Author: Alfred Coppel
Date: 2007-09-12 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; Action & Adventure; Mystery & Detective; General; Hard-Boiled; Traditional
Description: Night of Fire and Snow , first published in 1957, is a novel examining the life of a rising young writer who develops and eventually overcomes his writer's block. Interspersed are recollections of youthful love affairs, a marriage to a decent and also rich woman during the war, a long lasting affair with his best friend's wife (a top Hollywood starlet), and a liason with his sister-in-law. Author Alfred Coppel (1921-2004) was a fighter pilot in the Air Force during the Second World War, and Night of Fire and Snow includes some flying episodes. After his discharge, he started his career as a wr
Publisher: Wildside Press

NIGHT OF FIRE AND SNOW
by ALFRED COPPEL

Cover and kindle version copyright © 2015 by NightHawk Books, Steve W. Chadde, Series Editor.

Night of Fire and Snow was originally published in 1957 by Simon and Schuster, Inc., New York.

NightHawk Books

Night of Fire and Snow is part of our collection of noir detective, mystery, romance stories, and other largely forgotten books of dusty bookshelves but often surprisingly well-written—and always entertaining! We hope you enjoy them as much as we enjoy making them available once again as kindle ebooks.

Each book in the series is carefully reviewed to ensure a quality reading experience on your kindle device.

* * *

For E. A. C.

BOOK ONE

Paris-San Francisco

ONE

Miguel Rinehart was in the bar with Jean Claude when the speaker system announced that the flight from Frankfort had been delayed by weather and would arrive at Orly thirty minutes late. The female voice, made quite sexless by filtration through tubes and circuits, repeated the message in German and French and there was a multilingual murmur of disapproval from the passengers waiting in the lounge.

Jean Claude’s face was still set in lines of wounded disgust and Miguel looked away. His literary agent had some right to complain of him, but J. C. was characteristically sulking and Miguel, under the circumstances, found it exasperating.

In the mirror behind the rows of spigoted bottles, Miguel could see the reflection of the rainy field outside with its crisscrossing pattern of red, green and amber runway lights gleaming in the dusk. On the concrete ramp under the panoramic sweep of the waiting-room windows a Sabena Douglas was loading, its door standing open in the gloom. The rain fell listlessly out of a lead-colored sky. Miguel understood now why so much was made of spring weather in Paris. It was the only time you didn’t have to suffer through snow or sleet, or suffocating, muggy heat, or as now, in early September, a constant and depressing rain.

He had mentioned this to J. C. and the Frenchman had only snapped, “You are in a mood to find fault.”

The speaker system abandoned itself to a small combo version of “La Vie en Rose” and Miguel stirred restlessly. The Frankfort flights late arrival would delay the New York airplane and that, in turn, would hold up flights destined for Chicago and Tulsa, Los Angeles, Mexico City, San Francisco and on and on like a shock traveling along axons and dendrites so that tomorrow, half a world away, passengers in Hawaii and Buenos Aires would chafe.

Once something was decided, Miguel thought, once a course of action was established, nothing should be allowed to interfere. Airplanes and ships should arrive on time, people should fulfill their functions smoothly and without distemper.

It was almost as though he needed to say to himself: I am Miguel Rinehart, aged thirty-three. American, father, son, brother and husband. I belong. In the canyons of Madison Avenue or in the dry hills of California. Somewhere, surely, please God. But where? The answer had always evaded him.

Jean Claude tasted his Pernod and set the cloudy green glass carefully on the bar. “Of course,” he said, “the job was a small one—”

Miguel realized he was still talking about the story for Réalités that lay three-quarters finished on the abandoned desk in the apartment in Montparnasse.

“Nothing,” the agent continued sadly, “to compare with an offer from Artfilm. I understand that.”

“You can get someone else to do the piece,” Miguel said curtly.

“Yes,” J. C. said.

Meaning no, Miguel thought. Meaning damn you for leaving me in a hole with an uncompleted assignment and an angry editor.

“I’ve told you fifteen times already, Jean. I’m sorry I couldn’t finish it. There just wasn’t time.” Miguel fought to keep the irritation out of his voice. Why was it always so difficult to keep your temper when you knew you were doing something wrong, he wondered. “The cable said right now. Not a week from Sunday.”

“And when the so-great Nora Ames calls, you go. This I understand, mon Michel.” The light flashed disapprovingly from Jean Claude’s black-rimmed glasses.

Miguel took the cablegram from his pocket and held it out. “Would you like to look at the signature again?”

“I know. Victor Ziegler. As your countrymen say, who kids with who?”

Miguel put the cablegram back in his pocket and said, “What have you got against Nora?”

Jean Claude spread his hands. “As an actress? Nothing.” Miguel thought: If we follow this up there will be hard words and hurt feelings. He put a five-hundred-franc note on the bar and stood up.

“Order me another martini, will you? I just remembered I have some shopping to do.”

“Something for Artfilm’s Love Goddess?”

“No,” Miguel said. “Something for my daughter. Something for Dorrie.”

The agent looked contrite. “I keep forgetting,” he said. “This foolishness has upset me.”

“Is a thousand dollars a week foolishness?”

J. C. shook his head. “You do not go back for the money.”

“I need the money. No one should know that any better than you do,” Miguel said, frowning.

J. C. sighed. “I will never understand you Americans, my friend. A man with a wealthy wife should not have to waste himself writing claptrap for Nora’s films. What is this prejudice that devours you and your countrymen?” He finished his Pernod and shook his head again. “It is not my affair, but—”

“You’re right about that, anyway,” Miguel said.

“You are determined to go back.”

“Yes.”

“Twice you have worked in Hollywood and you have disliked it more on each occasion. These are your words, not mine.”

“This will make three. Order that martini, will you?”

“You should not return so soon. Forget that you have not completed the work I procured for you. It is a small thing. But Olinder will not forgive me for this. The letters he wrote. The encouragement. And the book not done. I shall hear about it.”

“Olinder isn’t my keeper,” Miguel said. “And, for that matter, neither are you.”

The agent looked moodily at Miguel. “How have I failed you, mon ami? Tell me. How?

Miguel was forced to smile. “No one will blame you, Jean.”

“I cannot believe it. To let you leave France with so much undone. What will Olinder think of me?”

Miguel had a sudden vivid memory of Tom Eubanks sitting in the shade of the oaks that grew around the English Building at Roslyn, saying in a stricken voice, “Holy cow, Spick. What’s that goddam old Olinder going to say when he finds out I haven’t done the term paper?”

Miguel remembered the incident well. He had written Tom’s paper for him and Olinder had recognized the style and had given both Tom and Miguel low grades. Tom had been tearfully grateful for the passing grade but Miguel had been angry enough to ask Olinder what fault he had found with the papers. And Olinder had replied that he had simply averaged out the A Miguel was going to get and the F he had been going to give Tom to get C’s for both of them, pointing out that excellence and incompetence always added up to mediocrity. Tom Eubanks, he said, was a fine boy and an excellent athlete, but he had no business signing up for an elective course in Medieval English Literature just because Miguel suggested it. “You simply spread yourself too thin, Michael. Be thankful I didn’t flunk you both for cheating.”

Karl Olinder no longer dealt in term papers, but he had never lost that ability to inspire apprehension. As senior editor for Hillyer Press, Olinder had given his old student vast latitude. But because Miguel had failed to do what was expected of him, Jean Claude feared Olinder was going to raise hell in his quiet, pedagogic way. And so do I, Miguel thought. But I’ll make it up to him.

“If you had only applied yourself,” J. C. said.

It occurred to Miguel that applying oneself while running away wasn’t as simple as it seemed. Work was said to be the anodyne for sickness of soul, but it hadn’t solved any problems this trip. Nora, he was sure, would be glad to know it.

He straightened the collar of his trenchcoat, feeling too warm in the closeness of the lounge. “Tell the barman to go easy on the vermouth, will you? One in six is plenty.”

The agent hunched his shoulders over the bar. Like a brooding stork, he pulled his neck down into the loose ring of his collar and said, “Sit down, mon ami. You have sufficient time for buying gifts.”

“I want something special for Dorrie,” Miguel said.

Jean Claude, who was childless, sighed and said, “Une petite fille—how I envy you, mon Michel. But you have been apart for so long.”

There was an implied criticism that Miguel could not ignore. “It’s been a necessary separation,” he said.

Jean Claude lifted his eyebrows. “Nora resents the child, I suppose?”

“Certainly not. Why should she?”

J. C. shrugged. “Alaine’s daughter. After all, one must suppose—”

“You’re doing too much supposing tonight,” Miguel said in a voice edged with anger.

“You are offended with me. I am sorry, mon ami.”

“I have known Nora for a long time,” Miguel said harshly. “You don’t know her at all.”

“Only by reputation.”

Miguel felt his hand tighten on the agent’s arm. It was an angry reflexive motion.

“Please, please, mon Michel. We are friends.” Jean spread his hands helplessly. “I have trouble with your language sometimes. Have I implied something wrong?”

No one, Miguel thought, could be quite as artless as Jean Claude pretended to be. But he released his grip on the agent’s arm and stepped back.

“You fail to understand me,” J. C. said. “If I am offensive you are quite right to become angry with me. A man must defend his mistress, this I know. How else would order be preserved in the world? But it is also a customary thing for a mistress to resent a man’s legitimate family. If she did not it would be a reflection on the sanctity of marriage. My own mistress despises my wife. It is the way of things. And were I fortunate enough to have a beautiful young daughter I would not consider it inappropriate that my mistress hate her as well.”

“My God,” Miguel said in exasperation. “Why don’t you stop talking?”

“I grieve,” Jean Claude said. “And I do talk too much. But I am heartsick to see you go. I think of Karl Olinder waiting for a fine book that is unfinished. And in the eye of my mind I see you sitting in Hollywood. There are palm trees and no seasons. You are wasting yourself writing adaptations of the work of your inferiors. Yes, this much more I will say. Nora is the destroyer of your talents.”

“And they say the French never drink too much,” Miguel said. “I’m going downstairs to the arcade.”

“Wait. This is a sad occasion for me. I have been an attendant to greatness. And it is dying before my eyes.” Jean Claude regarded him liquidly.

Miguel felt an amused impatience. “I’ll be back,” he said. He put his brief case on the bar. “Keep an eye on that for me.” The agent laid a protecting hand on the scuffed leather. “All right. I will sit with this stillborn child and remember better times.”

Miguel turned and walked toward the stairway. The dusk beyond the windows was thicker, tinged with blue. Humor and anger drained out of him. He felt unaccountably tired and depressed. Was there any reason, he wondered, why he should avoid telling Jean the simple truth? That he doubted his ability to write another novel, in France, in Spain, Italy, anywhere? What did the place matter? The failure to complete the book was only the last in a long line of failures stretching back into the past.

And surely there were worse ways of spending those long and unproductive years he saw ahead of him. Writing screenplays he could still utilize the skill he had acquired over the years. Other people could create now. Let them.

The sense of loss was like a cold wind on his heart.

He found himself thinking of Alaine, remembering the apartment they had lived in on Telegraph Hill. The place with the cracked china and the view of the bay and Coit Tower. He remembered how they struggled with ration stamps and how Alaine, pregnant and unwell, had worked so hard to make ends meet on a first lieutenant’s pay, without touching her own money because she knew how touchy and proud Miguel could be.

Proud, he wondered, of what, exactly? Of his family? Of surviving the crash that crippled Tom, perhaps? Or of deceiving Alaine? Of diminishing her and lying to her?

Yet now, thinking back to that August of the last year of the war, it seemed that he had meant to keep his promises. Everything was so sharp and clear from this distance.

He had spent the first few days of August 1945 in Hollywood with Nora. Pete Wallace had been scheduled to fly the provost marshal to a meeting at the Los Angeles Wing, but Miguel had traded Wallace out of the flight and gone in his place. Three days and nights with Nora. Days and nights filled with bitter arguments and hungry lovemaking that left Miguel spent and angry.

He had left Mines Field at two in the morning and there had been trouble with one of the engines so that he had had to land at M inter and stand by for an hour while Sergeant Hayes located the defect and then two hours more to Hamilton Field, bucking headwinds and turbulence with the autopilot out so that he had to hand-fly the airplane all the way. And finally a Clipper ride into San Francisco in the gray dawn. And now he had to report back to the field at ten because General Kirbee was taking an inspection team of officers north to the fighter base at Moses Lake. The general wouldn’t fly with Pete Wallace, so the trade only worked one way, and Miguel felt stupid with fatigue and in no condition to talk about a separation he wasn’t at all sure he wanted.

Before Tom’s accident, Alaine used to tell Miguel that love was uninteresting to him unless it had the flavor of tragedy. Since the accident, she didn’t say it any more. What happened to Tom lent an almost ghoulish touch to Miguel’s infidelities. He was horrified with himself and helpless to call a halt.

There was talk. Nora was only just getting a start in pictures, so there was no real publicity. But the Army people—that was something else again. The Western Air Defense Command’s Flight Section was a small and closely knit unit, and Nora’s defection had caused a stir among the officers and their wives. It was natural they should gossip about Miguel and Nora Eubanks. God knew, Miguel thought, they had reason.

The sun slanting through the high window of the alcove touched Alaine’s hair. Miguel found himself watching her and thinking tiredly that, actually, she was very beautiful. Which was strange, because he had ceased to think of her in just that way, and yet now, listening to her tell him that their marriage was all but over, he could only think that she was beautiful.

He was weary and it was hard to think clearly. His rumpled uniform felt tight and uncomfortable, clinging like the hours of flight to his body.

“It isn’t working out for us,” Alaine said quietly. Her blunt, strong hands were closed around a half-filled coffee cup, as though she were seeking stability from the warm prosaic touch of the cheap china. In a similar situation, he thought, Nora’s hands would be extended, taut and nervous, over the table, hungrily seeking his.

He rubbed his wrist numbly with his fingertips and said something about the baby.

Alaine’s eyes lit up with scorn and she said, “You can’t really think I’d hold you that way, Mike.”

It made him feel ashamed, and in a way, unneeded. It reminded him that Alaine didn’t have to live this way, in an overpriced two-room walk-up with dusty curtains.

He watched her get up and move to the range to get him more coffee. It was like her to interrupt a crisis like this with a homely, almost banal touch.

She had once said to him, “I have all the bourgeois virtues. I read House and Garden and look at the pictures and say, that’s what I want out of life.”

That had been in the beginning, only days after their meeting, and he had been so sure that this girl, who reminded him so much of Allie Wylie—who even almost had the same name—was the answer to loneliness. It had seemed so clear-cut and simple that he had imagined that was what falling in love at twenty-three meant as opposed to the painful confusion of falling in love with Allie Wylie at sixteen.

Where did I go wrong, he wondered?

He waited in silence as she poured the dark, bitter coffee he liked into the cup. Finally he said, “Do we have to talk about it now? I have to be at the field by ten. You can’t decide something like this in a morning.”

It was a procrastination and not a very adroit one but he didn’t feel alert enough to do better.

He could feel Alaine’s eyes on him. They were dark and gray and solemn under arching heavy blond brows. There was a touch of light about her, he thought, a glow that lived just under her skin, and a rich fullness to her body, large-breasted and heavy with the unborn child. He felt a stab of desire for her and reached for her hand.

He pulled her down onto his lap and pressed his lips against her throat, feeling her sigh. “There’s always this answer,” she said ruefully, closing her eyes. He opened the front of her dressing gown and laid his face against the coolness of her breast. He could hear the quickening of her heartbeat.

“This will do us no good at all,” she said faintly.

“I know. Just stay where you are for a minute, that’s all.”

Was she thinking of Nora, he wondered? It was odd, he thought, that coming back here fresh from his mistress—what else could he call Nora now?—he could suddenly think that he loved Alaine so. It was as though Nora were his wife, his keeper, and Alaine his love.

“Please, Mike,” she said, her eyes still closed, “we can’t talk this way.”

“I don’t want to talk, Allie,” he said.

“Will you be gone overnight again?”

“I don’t think so. Kirbee doesn’t like Moses Lake.”

“Will you have someone call me if you have to stay?”

“Ill have Chavez call. But I’ll try to get back.”

Alaine stood up and held her gown together. She looked down at him and asked, “Mike, will you tell me the truth?”

“What, Allie?”

“You did see Nora this trip, didn’t you?”

“That isn’t a question.”

“Mike, please.”

“Is that what you think? That every RON south of Santa Barbara is a shack-up with Nora?”

“Tell me. I want to know.”

“Yes,” he said. “I saw her for a few minutes. Is there anything wrong with that?”

Tears welled into her eyes and she turned her face away.

“It isn’t what you think, Allie.”

“Mike—don’t lie. I can’t bear it when you lie to me.”

He looked out across the sunlit roofs to the blue water of the bay. Richmond and Berkeley were clear and bright, and beyond, stacked against the hills, great towers of white cumulus rose into the sky. They made him think of the morning Tom and he had flown out into the stormy palisades toward that appointment with finality in the frozen mountains.

Gulls banked and wheeled over the ebb-tide rushing through the channel of the Golden Gate and only the Navy tugs tending the submarine nets gave evidence that this was a year of war.

For a moment Miguel surrendered to an irrelevant fear. The war was ending. The smell of victory was everywhere. And how did a man live in a world at peace? To Miguel the war had meant escape.

“Allie,” he said suddenly. “When the war’s over let’s go away. I mean really far away.”

Alaine sighed and said, “Oh, Mike—”

“I mean it, Allie. Another year. Eighteen months at the outside. Your sister can take care of the baby for a while. We’ll go to Europe or maybe to South America.” He stood up and walked around the table to stand in front of her. “We need this, Allie. You know we do. I’ll have terminal leave pay coming and I’ve got almost twenty-five hundred dollars of Reserve bonus money. Let’s use it and just go. Maybe I could really do that book—Allie?” He realized suddenly that he was pleading with her to give him another chance at what they had once thought they had acquired with the marriage ceremony.

“Mike,” she said quietly, “are you sure? Is it what you want?”

“I’m sure,” he said, wondering if she knew how completely unsure he was about almost everything. She could generally tell when he shaded the truth, but he expected generosity from her. He felt he had, for some reason, the right to expect it.

“With the baby and another year’s service I’ll have enough points to get out,” he went on anxiously. “Allie?”

“And Nora, Mike?”

“Forget Nora. Please.”

Alaine regarded him soberly. “Can you?”

“Yes, Allie. I swear it to you.”

Alaine sat down and folded her hands in her lap. Miguel watched her, waiting.

Presently, she said, “Your father would expect you to come home.”

Yes, Miguel thought, Raoul would expect that. “No,” he said. “That’s out. No matter what.” And that much he was sure about. He had decided four years ago that he would never go back to Los Altos. In a way he could not quite bring himself to examine closely, he felt he owed it to his brother Luis to stay away. Luis, wherever he was, would understand.

The telephone rang and it was Sergeant Chavez at the Flight Section asking if Lieutenant Rinehart would mind getting out to the field a little early. General Kirbee wanted to make the round trip to Moses Lake before nightfall.

Miguel showered and changed into a fresh uniform. He felt cleaner and better.

At the door, he took Alaine in his arms. He could feel the child moving inside her. What would it be, he wondered, a son? Or a blond daughter with somber gray eyes.

“Are we all right, Allie?” he asked.

“I hope so,” she said.

“We will be,” he said, and kissed her hard.

But riding in the Clipper, Nora came back. She always came back. He found himself remembering something Tom had once said, half-jokingly, half-bitterly. “It’s like watching incest to see you two together, you’re so much alike.” And Miguel had to shut his eyes and press the heels of his hands against them to blot out the sight of Tom with his face turned away into the snow and the blood oozing from his stumps into the muddy drifts.

Two of his fellow passengers, a Signal Corps captain and a flight surgeon, tried to start a conversation, but Miguel pretended to be asleep.

A month later, September 6, Dorrie was born. And in the spring, Miguel was a civilian again. There had been a year of work on the book—a good year that ended the following March in Europe. The Canceled Skies was winning him a reputation.

Nora, he heard, had remarried.

TWO

The arcade was brightly lit and crowded. There were people dozing on benches, others arguing with the douanier about duties. The ticket counters were two deep in gesticulating Frenchmen, Belgians, Italians, Americans, Germans—all complaining about the delays caused by the weather as though the harassed ticket agents could do something about it. With the doors closed against the Paris rain, the place smelled of garlic and damp wool, of perfume and sweat and liquor. The streams of travelers in the ugly room flowed together to make a mindless, displaced eddy. It struck Miguel that he was now part of this displaced population, the mass movement of people from here to there and back again, rootless and restless—some but for a short time and others, perhaps, forever—blown by the four winds and ten thousand airplane engines to and fro across the rim of the world. A man could so easily lose his sense of identity in this sea of transient humanity if he lacked the anchor of a home, of a place where he belonged.

He made his way through the crowd to one of the counters where a huge glossy cat lay curled amid the perfume bottles surveying the room with yellow eyes half-closed by indifference. For some reason the animal’s lazy insolence pleased him. If I were to see only that cat, he thought, and that counter with its glass Taj Mahals of perfume, I would know I was in France. Other cats must have looked at the Nazi conquerors just that way, somehow typifying the pliable intractability and the charming ill temper of the Gallic spirit.

These are the things I should have written about, he thought: French cats dozing on counters and petite salesgirls looking the way Parisiennes are supposed to look: slender, hungry-gaunt and small-bosomed and wearing cheap black dresses with the flair and style of Schiaparelli originals.

He shook his head at the thought. What nonsense went through a man’s mind when he stood before a perfume counter. A blue enameled case the color of the sea at Alassio. A lip rouge that captured the sunset at Mont Saint Michel. A tiara of rhinestones like the drops of dew on the grass on a nearly forgotten morning in Normandy.

I can think of these things, he thought. But when I write them, they die.

The girl addressed him in rapid French. Perversely, he replied in even more rapid Spanish. My mother’s tongue, he thought. Maria’s language and Concha’s. How long ago it all was.

The girl shrugged. It was a charming gesture and he could not help smiling at her.

“I’m American,” he said. “Let’s try it in English.”

“I took m’sieu for a Frenchman,” she said. Clearly, she meant it as a compliment.

Miguel was often taken for French or Italian. The dark hair already flecked with gray, the heavy black brows and the sharply aquiline nose looked European. Only the blue eyes struck a wrong note.

He considered buying some perfume for Nora and discarded the idea. She had once asked him to make suggestions about her clothes and the cosmetics she wore. But that was long ago and she didn’t need that now. Nora learned quickly.

‘That small music box, ma’mselle,” he said. “May I see it?”

“Ah, c’est très charmant, m’sieu,” she said, smiling at his choice.

When he lifted the lid of the tiny enameled chest, it played “The Bridge of Avignon.”

“Combien, ma’mselle?”

“Eight thousand francs, m’sieu.”

It was more than he should spend, but he said, “Wrap it, please.” It would make a wonderful gift for Dorrie.

The girl handed him the parcel and wished him bon voyage. The cat had gone to sleep.

Walking back toward the stairway, Miguel toyed with the idea of buying something for his sister. It had been three years since he had seen Essie and looking at the wares displayed behind the plate windows lining the walls of the arcade, he thought of some token, some tangible thing he might put in her hand to express the loneliness he felt for her and kindle the friendship they might have had but had never achieved.

But what did you buy for a Bride of Christ? The phrase, medieval and overly emotional, was her own. To buy a gift for someone assumed a certain understanding. And understanding was a thing that had never existed between Essie and himself. It was far too late now. Perhaps it had always been too late. If there had ever been a chance it was lost just as surely as the pale love Essie might once have felt for Anson Wilbur was lost. Essie was no longer Miguel’s sister. The gates of the convent had closed behind her and left nothing of the woman she might have become. Even her name was gone. There was no woman named Esther Rinehart in Miguel’s world. There was only an austere face under a starched coif that had, through some strange alchemical interaction between her personal need and the need of Mother Church, become Sister Cecilia.

Only once had it seemed that familial closeness might develop among the Rineharts. That first summer at the river. The summer of 1932 and the months that went before it, while Patches was being built. How ironic, Miguel thought, is that word seemed.

In the autumn of 1931, indulging a passion she never satiated, Maria Rinehart bought land on the Fitch Mountain Road out of Healdsburg. It was a slanting two acres of loamy soil, somnolent in the California sun and thick with madrona and hazelnut. The Russian River wound through the vineyards a quarter-mile away, flowing past willow groves and pebbly beaches from Eagle Rock to Del Rio Woods—a slow lukewarm river, deep and green and often treacherous.

The new resort area had been heavily promoted by Mr. Coward, a balding fat man with an Elk’s tooth and a golden watch chain and an office like a gabled privy at the entrance to Del Rio Woods proper. Mr. Coward’s efforts had been rewarded with a sudden flurry of building along Fitch Mountain Road. By the time Maria Rinehart bought her land there, there were summer cabins generously planted on the mountain’s slopes and Del Rio was populated with people from San Francisco and Oakland anxious to get away from the relative coolness of the Bay Area and into the suffocating heat of the river country.

The houses all had names and were built to resemble something whenever possible. The names ranged from an unpronounceable Yram-na-mot—Tom and Mary spelled backwards—to a continental Villa du Soleil—a communal retreat for a group of French people from the Peninsula.

Maria Rinehart was first amused by the naming mania and then trapped by it. Miguel, who was nearly eleven, thought it delightful.

If Miguel was fascinated by the prospect of naming the house-to-be, it was his sister Esther who begged Maria to let her award the job of designing it to one of her friends from the California School of Arts and Crafts.

The friend was Anson Wilbur, a stocky young man of twenty with unruly hair and burning eyes.

Raoul Rinehart, who lived apart from the family, and Miguel’s brother Luis, who worked for Raoul, both warned that Anson was a Red, and worse, an idiot. But Essie thought Anson sensitive and Miguel thought him a hell of a fellow.

“I see the house,” Anson would tell Esther mystically, “as something nested in the soil—drawing its strength from the earth.” And then, more practically, he would ask if there were any chance that Maria might let him have the job of building the place.

Work, that year, was hard to find, and Maria, more out of compassion than out of confidence in Anson, finally succumbed to Esther’s pleading. She made a provisional arrangement with Anson.

Anson declared he wouldn’t even make a preliminary sketch until he had spent a couple of days on the ground “getting the feel of the place.” This seemed reasonable, so Maria planned a weekend in Healdsburg for the family, Anson to drive up in Essie’s Whippet roadster with his “associates.”

The associates turned out to be three frowning young artists as young as Anson. Maria began to have some misgivings, but she felt herself committed. Raoul was on a business trip in Mexico and wasn’t consulted. Since their separation four years earlier, Maria made a point of not seeking her husband’s advice on business matters.

For two days Anson and Esther and their friends tramped the ground in a bleak January rain, exclaiming on the beauty of the red-skinned madrones and the misty view of the river. Miguel followed them everywhere.

Two weeks passed after the family’s return to the house in Berkeley before Anson arrived with the plans and perspective drawings. It was a two-week stretch of agonized impatience for

Miguel. Concha, his nana, cautioned him about the sin of covetousness, but without much effect.

Yet, when the rolled sheets were spread out on the solarium floor, the wait seemed more than worth while. For Anson had designed a house that looked like a mushroom.

The floor plans were a jumble of curved lines and figures, but the perspective sketch showed an elfin house nestled in a landscape that might have been part of the land of Oz.

Essie regarded her family with all the triumph of her eighteen years. Concha smiled and nodded her approval. “Qué curiosidad!” All looked at Maria.

Maria Rinehart pursed her lips and smiled like a Rafael madonna. She inclined her head regally and it was understood that the design was a success. The house would be built by Anson and his friends.

The mushroom was to be called Séptimo Cielo—Seventh Heaven. Both Maria and Esther had been deeply moved by Janet Gaynor and Charlie Farrell in the film of that name.

Anson and his co-workers were in a whirl of preparation and copies of the plans were now sent to Raoul, who objected bitterly to the whole thing. His opinions were disregarded, and Anson was dispatched to Healdsburg in early February with Maria’s check for five thousand dollars to begin construction.

A stream of unemployed artists, sculptors, woodcarvers and musicians followed him.

In March, and chaperoned by Concha, Esther drove up to Del Rio to check on the progress of the house. She returned crestfallen. She had taken her Kodak with her and the pictures she brought back showed a roughly oblong frame structure, far from completed.

Miguel, studying the photographs, remarked ingenuously that it really didn’t look very much like the mushroom in the drawings. Essie grew angry with him and Maria made him apologize. It came to him that Anson’s failure was Essie’s failure as well. She was responsible. He felt very sorry for his sister but he couldn’t help a certain feeling of resentment as he looked at the boxlike structure in the photographs. The wonderful gnomish house in the fairy landscape began to fade from Miguel’s mind.

By early May, the money was gone and most of Anson’s friends with it. The house, farther than ever from any resemblance to a mushroom, looked like a shoebox. And it was still unfinished.

Anson crept back to Berkeley in an agony of self-chastisement to tell Maria and Esther that he needed more money to finish the house and that progressive modifications and simplifications in the design would result in a rather more conventional house than he had at first planned. Almost in tears, he admitted that drawing a house that looked like a mushroom was rather simpler than building one.

Maria, for Esther’s sake, hid her annoyance. Raoul was beside himself with irritation. It was up to him to supply the extra money to complete the house and there was no way out of it. Good money must follow bad. After a bitter scene, the money was produced and the work continued. In Miguel’s mind the mushroom was replaced by a box, standing raw and unfinished in the woodland.

When school closed in June, Maria and Concha packed the family into the big Lincoln and moved to Healdsburg, renting a small house from an Italian family named Pavoni. From this distance, Maria kept an eye on Anson’s new—and smaller—crew of artisans. Essie was on the site each day, her presence a goad in the flesh of the suffering Anson, who by now realized he was not and never would be a builder of houses unique or otherwise.

The finished product, ready in time for the Fourth of July influx of Essie’s friends, was a rambling frame house, not without a certain unplanned charm. There were four large rooms, a kitchen, a long screened sleeping porch—added as an afterthought—and a not-quite-level sundeck. The house, after a wry family conference, was named Patches, and the earlier, more romantic name was never heard again.

Miguel thought less and less about the mushroom house, and by the time the family had settled comfortably for the summer at Del Rio, he was certain the mushroom had been a silly idea in the first place.

It was a slow and languorous summer, and withal, a time of discovery and excitement for Miguel. Here, he found that Maria did not cling so closely to her ancestral ways.

In the city, his mother kept her household intact and untouched by the life around her. Spanish was spoken almost exclusively. Miguel never forgot the humiliation of his first weeks in school, the shocking discovery that he could not speak the language of his schoolmates and teachers except brokenly—like a foreigner.

He hated being a foreigner. Nothing Maria could say to him could ever really engender in him the feeling of pride she felt in her apartness. She had been the daughter of hidalgos and hacendados, and though Raoul Rinehart had taken her from her family, outraging Spanish pride and Catholic morality, her love of him could not rob her of her sense of identity. Home, to Maria, was a great, dimly remembered hacienda in the Sierra Morenas of Northern Mexico, a feudal land holding measured in square miles. And her big house in Berkeley was redolent of her past.

In the still and somber conservatory hung a portrait of a noble ancestor in breastplate and morion and Miguel, suffering at the Ampico, doggedly practicing an art for which he had no talent whatever, could never escape the searching, cold blue eyes under the steel cap. And outside, in the warm afternoon, the sound of unknown neighborhood children playing kick-the-can would symbolize the thing he wanted more than anything else in all the world. To belong.

But at Del Rio Maria seemed happier and more willing to let him mingle with people of his own age.

He liked swimming and became quite at home in the water, to Concha’s distress. The nurse could not swim and she grew frantic when he struck out into the sluggish current. He had never before been particularly active, but now long hours in the open hardened him and turned his skin brown.

“You look like an Indio,” Concha would say.

“But, Nana,” he would tease. “You’re Indian.”

And the descendant of Aztec chiefs would say proudly, “I am one-sixteenth Spanish.”

He read a great deal, drowsing on the beach, or under the madronas. Maria was an easy mark for book salesmen and Miguel profited by her inability to refuse anything in tooled leather bindings.

She encouraged his keeping of notebooks and a diary, because she was distantly related to Blasco Ibañez and dreamed of literary greatness for her son. Raoul thought it mildly tiresome and planned that Miguel would follow his elder brother Luis into Raoul’s copra brokerage firm. Meanwhile, however, he did nothing actively to discourage Miguel’s “scribblings.” Raoul was not often on hand. He had acquired the habit of living apart, though not alone. Miguel knew that his father had a woman. The family called her La Roja—the Red One.

His father’s apartment was a fascinating place, with guns on the walls, their dark oiled stocks and bluish metal reflecting the light from the lamps with heavy gold fringe on the cloisonne shades. There were tapestries and draperies of heavy green plush that could be drawn over the windows to shut out every shaft of sunlight and turn the paneled rooms into a secret place. And often, mingled with the man smells of tobacco and brandy, there would be a haunting fragrance of perfume in the air. At these times Miguel would know La Roja had been there. It would give him a dreadful thrill. He knew she must be very bad and dangerous and very, very beautiful and he would feel oddly disloyal to the family as he sensed the presence of an enchanting evil and a door leading into a strange world beyond childhood.

But that river summer, Raoul and Luis were only a tiny part of Miguel’s life. Three hours from the city, Del Rio was like an island in a faraway sea: an island of tangled forests and sun-drenched beaches and long stretches of dusty gravel road. The three hours might well have been three hundred.

He mingled with the sons of the families on the mountain. He visited their houses and ate lettuce and tomato sandwiches and drank brown celery phosphates and listened to phonograph records.

There were always small reminders of his foreign background, of course. The gringos—he thought of them that way—could not fathom his attachment for Concha and called it sissy. It bothered him until Maria explained that American children were not raised by nanas. After that, he felt rather sorry for them and refused to take offense when they teased him about Concha.

His friends began to take over part of his life. There were three. Tommy Eubanks was fat and big for his age. His small, alert eyes were bright with precocious knowledge. Sandy Johnson, who was poor, stayed with Billy Alberg in the big house near Eagle Rock known as The Roost. They called themselves the Fitch Mountain Gang and they had a password (Swordfish), and a secret meeting place in a secluded glade of willows near Frenchie Beach, and a recognition cry that was supposed to sound like the yelp of a coyote. They liked to think their cry frightened everyone on the mountain.

Together, they roamed and explored the hills beyond Eagle Rock, made rafts, and even raided the vineyards across the river. Miguel didn’t like the sweet grapes and never ate any, but Tom could always eat his share and more and the raids were exciting. Once the vintner had even chased them all the way to the river bank with a shotgun loaded with rock salt. They spoke lovingly of that time around the beach fires after dark.

But best of all about that summer was the way it seemed to Miguel that he was finding a place for himself as a friend of Essie’s. His family ties were stronger than he knew and he took to himself anything that seemed to confirm them.

Often Anson, who had taken a job as lifeguard at Del Rio Beach to be near Essie, and Miguel and Esther would walk from Patches to Del Rio through the long twilights. These were the best times. The gravel road would shimmer white and ghostly in the fading light and the stars would come out—first one at a time and then suddenly the sky would be full of them shining through the branches of the overhanging trees. Miguel would feel secretly proud of himself because he almost always saw the first one and kept silent so that Essie could get her wish.

The glowworms would be shining in the hazelnut bushes and Miguel would scramble into the dusty underbrush, braving brambles and poison oak to emerge grandly with a smear of luminous life wriggling in his palm.

And there was the singing. They would stride along together, Miguel scuffing his feet in the gravel, singing. “Louise” was a great favorite. Essie could do a marvelous imitation of Maurice Chevalier with her lower Up pushed out and an old straw hat of Luis’s on her head.

But the song Miguel liked the best was “That’s Where My Money Goes,” because when they reached the verse that went, “She’s got a pair of hips just like two battleships—” Essie and Anson would let him carry the song alone and come in with a shout on the chorus: “That’s where my money, all my hard-earned money goes!”

And there were times when Essie would sing “Borrachita” for them in her sweet, thin voice and the plaintive melody would almost bring tears to Miguel’s eyes. “It’s the call of the blood,” Concha would say approvingly. “You cannot escape it.” Miguel was pleased about Anson’s job at Del Rio. He understood that Anson wanted to be around Essie, but Anson paid enough attention to Miguel to win him completely.

Miguel loved to sit and listen to Anson talk about books and music and politics. Anson knew a great deal about politics. He knew, for example, that Governor Roosevelt would be the next president, but only because Norman Thomas would steal votes from Mr. Foster. Hoover, said Anson, was destined for the ash can.

Miguel, who did not shed the last vestiges of his fathers Republicanism until ten years later, was rather shocked to hear talk like this. Everything Anson said seemed to open up new vistas and novelty was of itself shocking in Maria Rinehart’s family.

It surprised Miguel, for example, to see Tom’s parents, Oliver and Ella Eubanks, dancing with the young people at the Saturday night dances at Del Rio pavilion. Sometimes their boisterous behavior struck Miguel as peculiar and faintly unseemly.

Their parties at Eubank Onus, their house near The Roost, were loud and hectically gay. Occasionally Miguel would stumble into one while seeking Tommy, or one would develop on the spot as couples dropped in “for a little fun”

Both Oliver and Ella were drunk often. They knew how to mix alcohol and juniper extract to make gin and they made a great deal of it. And when they were drunk they quarreled a lot and laughed about things that didn’t seem funny.

Ella embarrassed Miguel. Once she had walked into the bathroom without knocking and found him standing at the toilet. Laughing at his confusion, she told him, “You have nothing to be ashamed of, honey. You’ll be quite a man some day.” He was humiliated and he didn’t appear at the Eubanks’ place for almost a week.

Sometimes Ella would lift her skirts and dance to the phonograph music, her thighs jiggling enormously and her breath coming in short, excited gasps. She spent time at parties whispering and giggling with Billy Alberg’s father. Oliver didn’t seem to mind. Oliver had been an aviator in the Great War and he had been to England and France, but now he was a real estate salesman and he was always trying to sell something to Martin Alberg. So he didn’t really mind if Mr. Alberg and Ella were together. “Sell him a lot, sweetie,” he would say with a big, toothy smile. “A little fun is okay, but sell him a lot.” And then he would burst into laughter at his own pun.

Billy’s father was a dapper little man with rimless glasses and a small, round paunch. He was one of those who blistered badly in the sun so he wore a shirt whenever he was on the beach. He even went into the water with it on and it clung to him, like a pink, slick membrane as he breast-stroked industriously through the torpid current.

According to Tommy, Mr. Alberg was rich. His house was the biggest on the road, and it was built on river frontage, which cost more. It had a private boat landing, although the Albergs didn’t have a boat. Mrs. Alberg, a pale and colorless woman, didn’t think boats were safe.

The Albergs had a green Studebaker with a California top and sliding windows and it was the best car on the mountain except for Raoul’s La Salle—which really didn’t count, because it wasn’t around very often.

Miguel grew curious about Mrs. Alberg. Someone had mentioned in his hearing that she was “a Scientist,” and the phrase, together with the two small leather-bound books she always carried, aroused his interest. He asked Maria about it.

“She is a Christian Scientist, dear,” Maria explained.

Miguel was still puzzled.

“Christian Science is a religion. A very kind and gentle religion that teaches one to think good thoughts and do kind things for one another.”

“Is that why Sandy gets to stay at The Roost?”

“Well, that’s part of it. Linda Johnson went to school with Lillian and since the Johnsons have very little money, Lillian has made it possible for Sandy to spend the summer here with Billy.”

“Then it’s a good religion?” Miguel asked.

“All religions are good,” Maria said.

“What does Billy mean when he says that God is love?”

“That’s part of their faith”

“Is God love?”

“In a way, dear.” She looked thoughtfully at him and added, “It is not always easy to believe. But Lillian has had a marvelous Demonstration.”

“You mean God actually demonstrated to Mrs. Alberg that He was love?”

Maria smiled tolerantly. “Perhaps. In a way that satisfied her, anyway. ‘Demonstration’ is a word used by people who are interested in Science.”

“I’m interested in science,” Miguel declared.

“That’s not the same kind of science, dear.”

“I always thought there was only one kind. Like chemistry and astronomy and physics.

“Well, this is a metaphysical science,” Maria said with a touch of impatience.

“Concha says you don’t believe in God if you aren’t Catholic.”

“Concha,” Maria said stiffly, “is a peon. In Mexico the priests and sisters sometimes teach things that are not so. But the peones have no way of learning that these things are untrue. You must not expect a woman of Concha’s class to understand everything, Miguel.”

“Are we Catholic, Mother?”

“We left the Church when I married your father,” Maria said. “Concha says if you were born Catholic you are always—”

“As I have just explained to you, Miguel,” Maria said with some asperity, “your nana is a good, but an ignorant woman. We have no family religion. Esther thinks of herself as a Catholic and I have no objection to it. Neither has your father. But I am no longer Catholic. Nor are you, unless you choose to be later, when you are older. It doesn’t really matter,” she went on more gently, “as long as you behave with kindness and honor. Follow the golden rule and you can be at home in any church.”

“Yes, Mother,” Miguel said. Presently he asked, “Do you understand Christian Science?”

“No,” Maria said thoughtfully. “But perhaps I shall study it. It has been a great comfort to Lillian, I know.”

“Is she so unhappy, Mother?”

“Why do you ask me that?”

“Billy says she is very unhappy.”

Maria let a sigh escape her. “The children always know,” she said.

“Know what, Mother?”

“Sin is sin, with or without religion.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Miguel said, perplexed.

Maria kissed him with a surprising show of emotion. “I hope you never will know.” He was disturbed to see tears standing in her dark eyes. “My poor fatherless boy,” she said.

Miguel felt a chill of uncertainty, as though the ground had trembled slightly beneath his feet. “I have a father, Maria,” he said. He called her by name very seldom, knowing she did not approve of it, but it seemed right just now.

“Yes, hijito, of course you have,” she said, wiping her eyes. He had no more stomach for discussing religion, but he wanted to get back on firmer ground. Maria had frightened him. “Why does Mrs. Alberg carry those books with her?” he asked. “She studies her daily lesson. Mrs. Eddy says one should never cease the study of Divine Mind.”

The idea of a grownup studying lessons was appalling to Miguel.

“Is Mrs. Eddy a teacher?”

“In a way, dear. She is the discoverer of Christian Science. She wrote one of the books.”

“I know. Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.”

“Miguel, you haven’t been touching Lillian’s books?”

“No. I looked over her shoulder.”

“That was very rude.”

Miguel was crestfallen.

“In fact,” Maria continued sternly. “One should not even ask about a person’s religion. The worship of God is a very personal thing. Lillian is a Scientist because it gives her comfort. Heaven knows she needs it.”

“Yes, Mother,” Miguel said.

“You will remember, dear.”

Miguel nodded solemnly. Suddenly he was struck by a thought. “Is Mrs. Eubanks a Christian Scientist, Mother?”

“I should say not,” Maria said dryly. “It would be straining charity to call her a Christian of any sort.”

THREE

The speaker system broke into Miguel’s reverie. He found that he had been standing before a display window near the stairway leading up to the cocktail lounge, letting the crowd flow by and around him.

How easy it was to drift off into the past these days. He wondered if it were a sign of encroaching middle age. Was thirty-three old? Sometimes it felt old. Older than God.

The metallic voice of Orly informed him that his New York flight would begin loading at the south concourse in five minutes. It was time to say good-by to J. C. and absorb the last flurry of his Gallic sarcasm concerning Nora.

He could handle Jean Claude’s thrusts easily enough, possibly because as the weeks lengthened into months and he had stayed on and on in Europe, he had found himself more and more at ease. Home might be where the heart was, but Miguel suspected he, for one, would always remain a split personality.

It was getting back into the society of Americans that was going to be difficult. Nora lived now in a glare of publicity. He wondered how it would be, living with Americans and listening to the things they talked about, the salacious lies about public figures. Did that singer really have a Negro child? Was that State Department secretary really a homosexual? And Nora, would people really know her only the way Jean Claude did? By reputation?

He wasn’t being fair. He knew that. He was too ready to generalize. Not every living soul in the land of the free was a thrill-hungry gossip. It was just that those who were would be hard to adjust to—and adjust he must. In the Beginning was the Word. And the Word was Adjust. Not easy to do. But didn’t he owe that much to Nora? She had worked hard for her success, worked for it and fought for it with the tools the wise and all-seeing gods had given her. He couldn’t ask her to give it all up and join him in the safety of obscurity.

It occurred to him to wonder for a moment if he were jealous of her. He didn’t think he could be jealous of the Nora he knew. But this other, this fictitious person of celluloid and glamour, this Nora Ames …

How could a man be sure?

Yet there was, and always had been, a disarming quality of frankness about Nora. It made you understand that she might cause someone pain, but only because it was necessary to her survival. It simply had to be done. Nora had gone into two marriages that way. First with Tom, because she needed him to take her out of the Victory Girl class and situation she loathed. It had. And then with Altmann, the producer she married in Hollywood in the spring of 1947, while Miguel and Alaine were in Europe. Altmann had been necessary to ease her through a trying period in her career. When she divorced him, he simply vanished, used up, an obliterated man. But was Nora to blame? She didn’t love Altmann and told him so. From the beginning. She loved someone she couldn’t have. So it had been Nora of the hungry eyes and the high pompadour, Nora the Victory Girl, who walked out on two marriages, not Nora Ames the Love Goddess.

These were things that only one who had known her as long and as well as Miguel Rinehart could know.

And there was one thing he felt sure he could count on. Nothing, neither success nor failure, could ever change Nora into anything intrinsically phony. She simply wasn’t that sort of person. She had her own ethics. They might be the ethics of the jungle, but they suited her.

At the bar again J. C. watched him polish off his martini. “You’ll take care of the apartment for me? The rent is paid until the end of next week. If there’s anything left behind, send it along care of the Magnussen Agency. They’ll know how to find me,” Miguel said.

Jean Claude shrugged. “How should they not? They will have only to read the papers and learn the whereabouts of a certain cinema star and her entourage.”

“There’s a beauty at the perfume counter. Maybe she’ll take your mind off my sudden prostitution,” Miguel said.

“Ah, mon Michel,” the agent said sadly. “It is your answer to everything.

“What might that be?”

“The woman. The mothering breast. The tender lip and gentle hand. I must say this. Forgive me and do not become angry with me. Each time to run from here to there, a woman is waiting. If there is none, you find one. This is tragedy. Women are for the body, not for the mind. When you learn this, you will have learned the secret of success.”

“I’ll forgive you the inaccuracy of your statement,” Miguel said mirthlessly, “but not the romantic notion you have of how I spend my time.”

J. C. sighed heavily and said, “You will not return to France, mon Michel. I have the feeling.”

“I’ll be back,” he said, wishing the Frenchman would contain his sentimentality. In some ways, Jean reminded Miguel of his father. Raoul, with a few drinks in him, had always been a marshmallow of concern for his fellow man, but a pirate when the chips were on the table.

The speaker system announced the flight and Miguel was glad. It was always unpleasant to run out of conversation once your good-bys were said.

“That’s it,” Miguel said. “Thanks for everything.”

“I am sorry about the tourist flight, ami. I had no time to do better.”

“I couldn’t afford better anyway,” Miguel said, picking up his brief case.

“Afford,” Jean said scornfully. “Artfilm will pay.”

“I sincerely hope so.”

Jean took off his glasses and stood up. “You will write?”

“Yes.” A conventional lie. He would not write, nor did J. C. expect it. But if they chanced to meet again, they would pick up their friendship where they had dropped it. It was one of the advantages of so casual a relationship. You never got hurt and you could afford to be tolerant. Even charitable.

“Please give my best to Karl Olinder when you see him. Tell him I did my very best to dissuade you from this idiocy of going to Hollywood.”

“I’ll tell him,” Miguel said.

“Magnussen will be pleased, naturellement.”

“I imagine he will.”

“I was not meant to be an agent, perhaps,” J. C. said. “I do not think like your Magnussen.” He paused and then said gingerly, “You will see Alaine?”

“I don’t know. Probably not right away.”

“I am a busybee.”

“Busybody.”

“Bee, body. What does it matter? My heart is heavy. Such a waste, such a pity.”

Miguel found himself growing weary of Jean’s lamentations. He took his boarding pass from his wallet and said again, “Well, thanks for everything. No need for you to get wet. Stay here and have one last Pernod to the memory of an ex-expatriate.”

Jean Claude, his eyes moist, kissed Miguel on both cheeks and said, “I shall miss you, mon Michel. Try very hard to return.”

“La belle France,” Miguel said.

“Adieu, mon ami.”

“Hasta la vista, prieto,” Miguel said. He touched his arm and left him at the bar and walked downstairs and through the arcade toward the south concourse to join the straggling line of tourists, servicemen, honeymooners and salesmen filing through the gate into the drizzling rain.

The Constellation was crowded with a group from Frankfort. They had monopolized all the window seats and were shouting to one another in German. The stewardess, a French girl, was staring morosely at the excited Teutons. Remembering the pictures of Dachau, Miguel wondered? Or perhaps an elder brother taken into forced labor a decade ago? Times change, ma’mselle, Miguel thought.

He found himself a seat next to a Belgian Air Force officer and settled down.

A plump blond burgher in the seat ahead lit a cigarette. The Belgian leaned forward and tapped his shoulder sternly, calling attention to the Défense de Fumer sign alight over the door to the cockpit. The German studied the officer’s blue uniform for several seconds and then a smile spread over his porcine features and he nodded affably and crushed the cigarette in the ash tray.

“Les Boches,” the Belgian said under his breath. He turned to regard Miguel with a steady, almost disconcerting intensity. “You are American, are you not?” he asked.

“That’s right.”

“I surmised as much. I heard you speaking to the girl at the perfume counter. I knew you were not English.” He extended his hand. “Pierre Artigue.”

Miguel took the hand and said, “Miguel Rinehart, Lieutenant.”

The officer looked pleased. “You know the ranks. Even after fifteen years of being overrun by uniforms, so few people know the ranks.”

“I was a pilot in the American Army,” Miguel said.

“You were in Europe?”

“No.”

“The Pacific?”

“No,” Miguel said again. As always, when this conversation took shape, he felt a deep resentment of his father’s interference and influence that had kept him safe from harm, secure as Kirbee’s aide-de-camp, while other men fought the war. Perhaps it was foolish and quixotic, but when he had left home for Flying School that spring of 1942, he had been seeking a trial by fire and Raoul had reached unasked into the upper echelons and taken it from him. And then later, because of Alaine, he had lacked the spirit to take the transfer Colonel Holman had offered him into an alerted squadron. By that time it had been too late, really. He had been bought. Maybe it was Raoul’s way of paying him back, but he doubted it. The truly hurtful thing about it all was that even then, everything Raoul did for him was because, in his way, he loved him. Absalom, oh, my son—

I could have been kinder, Miguel thought. But how, good God, how? And what good would it have done to feign kindness? When love and respect turned to hate, what sort of miracle was needed to turn it back to love again?

Yet how the ripples spread. If Raoul had not influenced General Kirbee, Miguel and Tom would never have started out across the mountains together that morning. Nora would probably still be Tom’s wife. And I wouldn’t be sitting here now, Miguel thought, sitting on a French airfield ready to fly the Atlantic to go to work for a man named Ziegler in a lotusland called Hollywood.

The young Belgian’s voice asked, “You had an accident, perhaps?”

“Yes.” Yes, you could call it an accident. If you didn’t know better.

“You would rather not speak of it,” the Belgian said darkly. “Not while we are in the hands of French pilots.”

Miguel tilted the seat back and tightened the safety belt across his lap. A rumble spread through the airplane as one engine started, then another. The beam of the landing lights cut a slice out of the rainy darkness.

“It seems to me,” the lieutenant said thoughtfully, “that I know your name from somewhere. Were you ever a resident of Liege?”

“No.”

“I have an excellent memory for names ordinarily. Are you related to the Rheinhardt family of Brussels? They make shoes.”

“No, I’m sorry. I have no relatives in Europe.” For a moment Miguel considered cutting short this inevitable search for a common ground with the information that he was an author and that perhaps the lieutenant had heard of him in that manner, but then he realized such a statement would lead to the equally inevitable and far more trying litany that began with, “Oh? And what do you write?” He was too tired and too preoccupied with his own thoughts to run through the entire rigmarole, so he merely said, “I have been in Europe for nearly a year. We may have met somewhere.”

The lieutenant nodded agreement, his memory for names vindicated. He was silent as the airliner began to move. Then he asked, “You are still an aviator?”

“Only occasionally.”

“Ah. A pity.”

“Yes.”

An aviator, Miguel thought. We never called ourselves that. Pilot. Airplane driver. Wartime talk. He closed his eyes. He hoped Lieutenant Artigue would not want to make conversation all the way to Shannon. There were people who couldn’t resist the challenge of trying to charm every passing stranger with their friendliness. Or whatever.

Nora was like that, and it came across in her pictures. It was one of the secrets of her phenomenal success. Only Miguel knew it was a cultivated thing. “Part of my art, darling,” she said. She had worked very hard to develop it.

The airplane taxied through the rain, ponderous, slowly pitching as it rolled over the undulations in the concrete taxiway.

Alaine, Nora, Allie. Like a three-headed guardian of the gates of my life, Miguel thought. Brutal simile. But apt. First there had been Allie Wylie, the tender image of the past. Then suddenly Nora and Alaine. Thinking of it now, he was plagued by the duality of fate. To have met both Nora and Alaine on the same night, in the same place, was somehow symbolic and just. The twenty-third of February, 1943.

He was sitting alone, holding a table for four in the Lower Mark, listening to the piano player toying with a song called “You Are Always in My Heart,” and waiting for Tom Eubanks and Billy Alberg to show up with their dates.

The bar was crowded with men in uniform and their women. In the corner near the piano, a young Marine lieutenant held his girls hand in that peculiarly desperate grip of imminent parting. At the end of the bar, a girl in a cheap tight dress that would have been out of place in the Mark Hopkins in a world at peace, held a group of naval officers at bay with a red smile. A major of paratroops with ribbons on his blouse hunched over his highball and surveyed the room with moody hostility. A trio of flying cadets huddled around a tiny table laden with empty glasses watching a second lieutenant fresh from Flying School describe with his hands the maneuvers of his final check. And through it all, a sprinkling of civilians, prosperous, self-conscious and conspicuous in that sea of blue, green and olive drab. San Francisco, Miguel thought somberly, the rim of the happy land.

The news from North Africa was bad. The Afrika Korps had struck at Kasserine Pass and casualties were said to be heavy. Miguel was thinking of fliers he knew who were there. People he had met at Luke and Will Rogers Field. Thinking about it didn’t help. You could only hope they made it and forget it.

He looked around, but there was no sign yet of either Billy or Tom. They had planned to meet here and then go on to a party Oliver and Ella Eubanks were giving in Oakland. But Miguel had decided suddenly that he didn’t want to go and wouldn’t be missed at one of Ollie’s parties. Now he was simply waiting to see Billy and congratulate him on his new commission and maybe have a drink with Tom and then catch the Clipper out to Hamilton Field for dinner at the Officers’ Club. For lack of anything better to do, he could go down onto the flight line and help Sergeant Lippo and the line crew pull the engine of the general’s B-25. That was one thing about being Kirbee’s flying aide. You got to tinker with all kinds of airplanes.

He finished his drink slowly and ordered another. He glanced at his wrist watch. Six-ten. Then he looked up and saw her.

She was standing near the screen separating the bar from the wide passageway into the lobby so that the light from outside fell full on her face.

The images came all at once, in a tumbled montage. She was tall, with sunburned blond hair. Aldyth Wylie would look like that now. For one frightening instant he actually thought that it was Allie. But this girl was too tall and there were other subtler differences. And she was with Billy Alberg.

Miguel stood up. “This is Alaine Winters, Spick,” Billy said. “Allie, Mike.” Then, laughing a little uncertainly, he added, “Whoa there, boy. Come out of it.” And Miguel realized he was staring because the shattering coincidence of the name had caught him completely unprepared.

“Lieutenant,” Billy Alberg said lightly. “This is Navy territory. Withdraw your troops.”

Miguel realized he was holding Alaine’s hand. He smiled self-consciously and said, “Is that true, Miss Winters? Ensign Alberg in command here?” He tried to make the question impersonal, a bit of banter, but he felt he failed miserably. It was as though there were a steel band around his chest as he looked at her. And she regarded him curiously with solemn gray eyes and seemed to know what he meant. “I haven’t decided yet, Mike,” she said.

They sat down, Miguel across the table from her so that he could look at her, and Billy protectively close.

“Where’s Uncle Tom?” Billy asked.

“He’s been on leave. But he’ll meet us here,” Miguel said.

Billy craned his neck around, looking for a waiter.

“What do you do, Mike?” Allie asked. “I know you’re a pilot. But what else do you do?”

“Does everyone have to do something?”

“Almost everyone does.”

“Then I’m the exception, I guess.”

“Mike the modest,” gibed Billy.

“Didn’t I read a story of yours in The Atlantic?” Alaine asked. Miguel studied the play of light over the smooth, strong planes of her face. She accepted his scrutiny without awkwardness.

“I don’t know. Did you read it?” He was being suddenly flip and defensive and he didn’t want to be. He shook his head and said more sincerely, “I’m not going to ask you what you thought of it. I haven’t got that kind of courage.”

“I’ll tell you one day. When we’re friends,” she said.

He could feel his heart thudding and he was certain he was on the brink of making a bloody ass of himself. But she had said “when we’re friends.” That was a beginning. He glanced down at her hands. They were large and strong with lightly tinted fingernails. She smiled at him and held them up.

“No,” she said. “No ring.”

“I would have asked, you know,” Miguel said.

“What goes on here?” Billy Alberg asked broadly. “I don’t want to interrupt or anything like that, but the waiter would like to know what you want to drink.”

“I’m sorry, Billy,” Alaine said. But she didn’t sound sorry, Miguel thought triumphantly.

“Allie baby, I don’t mind,” Billy said grinning. “But look out for this character. He’s left a string of ruined girls from Phoenix to San Francisco.”

Miguel wanted to hit him, but he managed to smile and say, “There has to be some compensation for the curse of a Latin temperament.”

Billy banged him on the arm and said, “Well, there, just watch it, flyboy. Remember, I can tell her things about you that would curl her hair.” He looked around the room and asked, “By the way, where is she?”

“She?”

“Well, your date?”

“I wasn’t planning on going on to Ollie’s. I have to fly Kirbee to Mitchell Field tomorrow.”

Billy’s round face, made so young by the dark uniform and the crew-cut hair, looked pained. “We re celebrating my stripe, Spick. You can’t duck out like this. Besides, who is going to get Uncle Tom back to the base after he gets a skinful? You know how he gets at his old man’s parties.”

“Won’t you come?” Alaine asked. And Miguel knew that he would, knew that he had decided the minute she walked into the room.

“It’s six-thirty,” Billy said. “What time is Tom going to show up, anyway?”

“Any time now. There’s no hurry,” Miguel said.

“How about these characters, Allie,” Billy said. “Pretty soft, isn’t it? In the same outfit ever since Flying School. Damon and Pythias.”

“You could have enlisted with us.”

“Not this lad. I hate airplanes.” Billy’s expression changed slightly. “As a matter of fact, I’m not the only one. So does old Tom. You didn’t know that, did you?”

“Are you drunk?”

“No,” Billy said, tapping the rim of his glass with a fingertip. “I’m telling you what Tom told me himself. That weekend he came down from Moses Lake to see the USC game at Berkeley. We tied one on together at the Deke house and he gave me to understand that he only went into the Air Corps because of you. Maybe because of Ollie, but mostly because of you.”

“Tom says things he doesn’t mean when he’s loaded,” Miguel said. “Tom’s not afraid to fly.”

Billy shrugged and turned to Alaine. “You hardly know Tom, Allie, but he’s a funny guy. I don’t think I’m out of line in saying the old uncle just isn’t very bright. You probably know the type. Always on crutches in high school because he’s a fullback or a tackle. Big man on campus. To everyone but the Spick, here. Tom thinks this character is God with four stars on his shoulders.” He looked over at Miguel and said, with a shade of resentment in his voice, “It’s true, isn’t it, Mike?”

“Tom’s all right, Billy,” Miguel said quietly.

“Sure he is. Why wouldn’t you say that? You own him, after all. Ever since we were kids. Ever since the river. What is the secret of your strange power over the bear who walks like a man?”

“Knock it off, Billy,” Miguel said.

Alaine watched the two men in silence.

Billy shook his head ruefully and retreated a little. “Mind over matter,” he said. “Svengali and Trilby.”

A Marine pilot, very drunk, stood sadly for a moment swaying over their table. “Terrible situation, terrible,” he said, regarding them mournfully. “Even rationing women now. Awful.” He walked away through the crowd, shaking his head.

The interruption banished tension and Alaine and Billy and Miguel laughed companionably together.

“What’s the news from Kasserine?” Billy asked.

“Bad right now,” Miguel said. “We’re taking a pounding.”

“The Krauts can’t hold what they’ve taken.”

“No, but a lot of good men are getting the hammer.”

“Wait till the pride of the Navy gets there.”

“To Kasserine?” Miguel asked.

“Well, no. That’s expecting too much. Even for the Navy.”

“I thought nothing was too much for the Navy,” Miguel said dryly.

“I wish you could see my ship,” Billy said proudly. “A DMS—that’s a Destroyer Mine Sweeper, flyboy.”

“I know.”

“I didn’t know what they teach you in those Army barnstorming camps. But she’s a beauty. She’s sitting over in the basin at Hunter’s Point. We could drive out and take a look at her from the club, if you like. I’ve got my car.”

“No, thanks,” Miguel said.

“We’re on four hours’ notice, alerted,” Billy said, the golden stripe on his sleeve gleaming importantly.

“What are you doing out tonight?”

“If I have to go,” Billy said with an air of sacrifice, “Allie can . take my car back to Mother’s place for me.”

That would be perfect, Miguel thought hopefully.

“If I have to leave you with this guy, Allie,” Billy said, “watch him. He’s not to be trusted.”

Miguel decided to change the subject. He didn’t like the trace of malice that was creeping back into Billy’s voice. He’d be starting on Tom again soon.

“If you ever run into my brother Luis while you’re out tidying up the mine situation,” Miguel said, ‘let me know, will you?”

“Luis is one of the boys in blue?”

“He was on the Antietam the last I heard. He doesn’t write much.”

“You know, of course, you aren’t even supposed to know there is such a ship as the Antietam?”

“I promise not to tell, Admiral,” Miguel said.

Billy was feeling his liquor slightly. “A slip of the lip may sink a ship,” he murmured. And then, looking at the way Alaine was watching Miguel, he added, “And a slip of a girl may sink—

The waiter brought another round. Poor bourbon for Alaine and Miguel and a rum Coke for Billy. Miguel noticed Alaine had barely touched her first. The piano player started in on “As Time Goes By.”

“I’m glad they brought that one back,” Alaine said.

“It was written in thirty-one or two, wasn’t it?”

“That Ingrid Bergman,” Billy said clicking his teeth. “Yipe. Did you see the picture? Casablanca?”

“In Oklahoma City,” Miguel said.

“Were you at Will Rogers Field?” Alaine asked.

“I was with a P-38 group there. Before this.” Miguel touched one of the enameled aide’s shields on the lapels of his dark green blouse.

“My brother,” Alaine said quietly, “was killed there.”

“I’m sorry,” Miguel said. “Was he a pilot?”

“Yes. It’s all right, really. It happened before the war. I hardly knew him. At least it seems that way now. Only fliers—” She stopped and shrugged a little. “I worry about them.”

Miguel wanted to reach across the table and take her hand. Instead he sat quietly making love to her in his mind.

She wore a black cocktail dress with a collar that stood up like a ruff. He knew he would always remember that dress. The material draped from her wide shoulders with the static fluidity of a waterfall. He noticed the smooth breadth of her brows and how she wore her thick hair parted in the middle like a madonna’s.

She didn’t really look like Aldyth Wylie, he thought. She was uniquely and completely herself. But because he had once loved Aldyth so, he knew that he was trying to love Alaine. Quickly and without any period of probing and testing. And now, please God, Aldyth would fade into perspective and become, instead of a mountain of guilt, a fragment of childish experience, a birth of tenderness. Let me be grateful, he thought, but let me forget her.

“Have you lived in San Francisco long, Allie?” he asked, calling her by that name for the first time.

“I was born here.”

“Odd we never met.”

“I went to school in the East.”

“A woman’s college.”

Her eyebrows arched. “Wellesley. Does it really show? They told us it might, but I never believed it.”

“Well, it could have been Vassar. Or,” he said, wanting to impress her, “or just as a long shot, maybe Stephens. But Wellesley is better yet. You went there because some woman in your family went there before you.”

Alaine smiled and nodded. “Correct, sir. My mother.”

“They told you right when they said people would be able to tell. There’s a quality to a girl who has been educated in a a woman’s school—”

“Good or bad?”

“Neither, really. Just something.”

“Ah,” Billy Alberg said sarcastically. “An indefinable something. Trust a Latin’s intuitive understanding of Woman to detect it.”

“Then, too,” Miguel said, ignoring Billy’s comment, “there are good coeducational schools out here. Stanford, of course. Even California. So if a girl goes East its generally because she wants a woman’s school.’

“You see?” Billy said. “He reads us gringos like a book.”

“That’s come up before, hasn’t it?” Alaine said. “Are you a Latin, Mike? Rinehart doesn’t sound like it.”

“My mother was Spanish. Some day I’ll tell you about her. It’s quite a story.”

“Is she living?” Alaine asked.

“No,” Miguel said, remembering the terror of the night Maria died. “No, she isn’t.”

“Maria was a great lady,” Billy said, with a ring of alcoholic sincerity in his voice. “I know that sounds like pure com, but it’s true.” He rattled the ice cubes in his glass moodily. “She was one of Mother’s best friends. She and Mother both expected Mike to be a big writer some day. Important. I guess I was always a little jealous.”

“Are you writing something now?” Alaine asked.

“Yes and no. I have a pocketful of notes. For a novel about—what else?—fliers. Nothing too definite yet. I have a title. The Canceled Skies.”

“That’s from something of MacLeish’s, isn’t it?

“It’s from ‘The End of the World,’ ” Miguel said, pleased.

“One thing all of us have always liked about the Spick,” Billy Alberg said. “He’s a right cheerful boy.”

“It’s hard to write well about flying. You need imagination to write and imagination is bad in a pilot. It makes him afraid. Not many people have been able to turn the trick except maybe Saint-Exupery.”

Alaine said: “I’ve read only Flight from Arras. Frankly, it depressed me terribly.”

“Try Wind, Sand and Stars, or some of the earlier things he did. Like Night Flight.”

Billy Alberg lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair looking bored. He rubbed his palm over the new gold braid on his sleeve for a moment and then said, “You know I was thinking about that summer you and Tom and I spent on the river. And Sandy. Remember Sandy?”

“I remember,” Miguel said.

Billy turned to Alaine. “One time Mike, here, tackled Tom out behind the general store. David and Goliath. Oh, Lord, that was a long time ago. Fighting, kicking, biting. No holds barred.” He looked across the table at Miguel and asked, “Whatever happened to Anson Wilbur, anyway?”

“He went to Spain.”

“He always was a little pinko, wasn’t he?”

“You could call it that,” Miguel said.

Billy said to Alaine, “A real nut. Campaigned for William Z. Foster.” To Miguel, he said, “I always thought he had it out for your sister Essie.”

“My sister,” Miguel said to Alaine, wishing Billy would let him tell her these things in his own good time, “is a nun.”

“You’re Catholic, Mike?” Alaine asked.

Tm nothing.”

Billy regarded him disapprovingly. “His mother,” he declared with surprising primness, “was interested in Science.”

If Alaine misunderstood, she gave no sign.

“I’ve tested the power of prayer, let’s say. It never worked out for me,” Miguel said in a faintly sardonic tone.

“That’s a terrible thing to brag about,” Billy said.

“Just stating a fact.”

“He talks like this, Allie,” Billy said. “But he wears a medallion around his neck. Just try and get him to part with it and see how religious he gets.”

“It belonged to Maria,” Miguel said. “Religion has nothing to do with it.” He glanced across the room and said, “Here’s Tom.”

“And about time,” Billy declared, twisting in his chair. “What’s that with him?”

“From the look and size of it,” Miguel said, “I would say it was a girl. A rather attractive girl, too, wouldn’t you say, Allie?” Billy snorted. “I know a V Girl when I see one.”

Miguel signaled to Tom and stood up. Eubanks, bulky in his new Eisenhower jacket with the silver wings and bars gleaming on it, pushed through the crowd toward them, pulling the girl along behind him.

Then he was at the table, laughing and teasing Allie and making introductions with the air of a man who has just found a ten-dollar bill in the street. Miguel couldn’t remember ever having seen Tom more pleased with himself.

“This, chums, is Nora.”

Almost on cue, the piano player again took up “You Are Always in My Heart.” It was as though he had timed it with Nora’s entrance.

She wore too much make-up and her sweater and skirt were too tight and wrong for an evening in the city. Her hair was bright and combed into a high pompadour. She was a little cheap and ill-at-ease, but there was a feral brilliance in her large and expressive eyes as she surveyed the group around her. She made Miguel feel tainted with snobbishness and it annoyed him. She looked so vulnerable and so much what Billy Alberg said she was. It was Alaine who made her welcome, but it did not seem to be in Nora to respond to a woman.

“Hello, Nora,” Miguel said.

The girl looked at him and smiled slowly. Her face seemed to come alight when she smiled. You forgot the cheapness and noticed only the fine bone structure of the thin face and the small even white teeth and the almond-shaped Magyar’s eyes. “Tommy has talked to me about you, Mike,” she said carefully, seeking his approval. “I think we will be friends.”

Tom put his arm across Miguel’s shoulders and hooked his fingers through the shoulder loops of his blouse. “You bet you will, baby,” he said. “Isn’t she something for the troops, boy?”

And then to Nora he said, “Well, baby? Shall we tell them now?”

Miguel knew exactly what was coming now and for an unreasoning instant, he rejected it with all his power.

But Tom said proudly, “I want you to help me break it to the folks, Spick. Nora and I were married this afternoon.”

The rest of the evening seemed indistinct. The Eubanks party was like all the other Eubanks parties he remembered. Ella cried over Nora and Ollie slapped Tom on the back and said that he was proud of his boy and then to Miguel he said that it would be Miguel’s turn next, wouldn’t it. And then the evening became more and more raucous and even the fact that their only son had taken a wife that day couldn’t change the pattern the Eubanks had established back when they mixed their own gin in the bathtub. The people from the apartment downstairs came up and Miguel realized that Ella and Oliver hadn’t changed a bit, they had only grown older.

Miguel, after the first shock had worn off, didn’t pay much attention to Nora or Tom. He spent the evening jousting with Billy for Alaine Winter’s attention.

So there had been nothing in that first meeting to warn him that a line had fallen across the years of his life, nothing to tell him that forever afterward he would think of times and events in terms of “before Nora” and “after Nora.”

And in the weeks that followed, he thought very little about Tom and Nora. Because he was in the process of making Alaine Winters fall in love.

FOUR

The Constellation banked steeply around to give the tourists a last view of Paris. Below the dark shape of the wing, the city lay in a wheeled pattern of light fanning out from the floodlit hub of the Etoile. Traffic was heavy on the Champs Elysées, streaming around the round point and on down the gentle slope of the Avenue de la Grande Armée. The paving reflected the amber driving lights wetly.

Miguel wondered if J. C. were right, after all, and he would never again see Paris. He thought of the musty little apartment in Montparnasse, the cobbled street below, the bistro on the corner where you drank sweet vermouth and watched dusk fall over the city. It would be a pity not to return.

The airplane leveled and nosed into the low stratus deck and the city was gone—snuffed out of existence.

The No Smoking light went out and Miguel produced a pack of Chesterfields. Lieutenant Artigue accepted one with gratitude.

“Why it is, I do not know. No nation can produce a cigarette like America.” He held a light for Miguel. “You are returning home?”

“To California.”

“Ah,” the Belgian said approvingly. “I, with regret, deplane in Ireland. A holiday. It will be a change from constant association with the accursed French.”

The lieutenant shook his head and inhaled deeply. “I surprise you? Surely not.” He ran a finger over his thin mustache, looking at Miguel inquiringly. “You have been in Europe long enough to know the French. If I may venture an epigram, their lack of morality is surpassed only by their ineptitude in the sanitary arts.”

The stewardess, standing in the aisle with the passenger list in her hand, glanced darkly at Artigue. Miguel felt certain she had overheard.

“I know them,” the Belgian said heavily, “ah, how I know them. Would you believe this, m’sieu? I am stationed in Fontainebleau with the NATO Command. Now attend me, m’sieu. The Command, with commendable generosity, ordered apartments built for the French civil employees. These were new buildings, you understand, completely new. Now, m’sieu, would you believe that the French architects designed these structures without plumbing? Not a pipe, not a stool. Natural functions were relegated to an out-building. In this day and age, I ask you.” He looked indignantly at Miguel and when Miguel could think of no comment, he added, “Depravity. The heartland of Western Europe and rotten to the core.”

Miguel had a whimsical picture of Bea Lillie singing in her relentless soprano, “France, you’re rotten to the core—”

The stewardess was eyeing Artigue frigidly, but the Belgian continued without pause or remorse.

“One loses count of their governments since the war. Ten? Fifteen? France is congenitally headless. If the Reds were to drop an atomic bomb on Paris tomorrow one would be able to discern no difference in the behavior of the French nation.” Miguel had a fleeting picture in his mind of a fireball consuming Paris. The Louvre, the Opéra, the Tour Eiffel, vaporized. Sickening thought. But so in tune with the times.

He said, “You look for war in Europe, Lieutenant?”

“Pray le bon Dieu will permit no such tragedy,” the Belgian said, crossing himself. “But one must, after all, consider the bestiality of the enemy. They butchered the Royalists trapped in Madrid in 1936, they kill their own people with reckless abandon. Why should they pause at atomizing civilians?”

Miguel wondered what Anson would have to say to this so-positive young man. Anson had been as positive, as sure he knew what was right. Miguel could close his eyes and see him pushing the mower across the grass in front of the big house on Rockridge Terrace, wearing corduroy trousers and a gray sweat shirt with A.W. and E.R. in a painted heart across his back. And Miguel remembered the day Anson wrote to say that he was boarding a ship to fight the good fight. Or what had been the good fight then, in the starry-eyed thirties.

The Belgian officer was twenty-five, perhaps. Eight years Miguel’s junior. It made a difference in the way things were remembered. The lieutenant would have been six years old when Anson died in Barcelona, fifteen when the first civilians were atomized in Japan. Time and expediencies interacted and perspectives changed. The Loyalists of yesterday were on the Attorney Generals list today. Last years Falangists were this year’s friends and allies. To stay completely sane, you must stay completely flexible. Inconstancy was the key to survival in the twentieth century. Raoul had always understood that. Maria had not, and she had gone under, been demolished. Essie had found the timeless refuge of the cloister.

The family, the family, Miguel thought bleakly. What, in the end, had it come to. Scattered, disaffected, embittered. Where, for example, was Luis? The last Miguel had heard had been in 1947. Luis had been serving on a Palestinian blockade runner and talking of joining Haganah. How that must have pained Essie.

The stewardess served dinner to those who had purchased meal tickets. A limp salad, a chicken bisque, Vichy water, and a fair Moselle. Lieutenant Artigue ate rapidly but daintily. When he had finished, he announced that there had been no good French wines since 1937.

The remains of the meal were cleared away and the Belgian chattered pleasantly about the fall of the Mendes-France government, the brutality at Dien Bien Phu, and the Chinese Nationalist question. Miguel listened with half-closed eyes and after a series of unanswered sallies, Artigue smoothed his mustache philosophically and buried himself in a dog-eared copy of Les Nues de Paris.

Miguel turned off his reading lamp and regarded his fellow passengers. Near the front of the cabin sat a pair of American honeymooners, not young, rather loudly dressed. The woman, who was wearing orchids, had her face close to her husband’s and they were whispering. In a seat across from Miguel, a baby slept peacefully beside its mother. Outside, the green wingtip light blinked steadily in a halo of mist.

The vibration of the engines was hypnotic. Miguel turned his head to look across Lieutenant Artigue at the darkness outside. The collector rings of the engine exhausts glowed cherry red in the night and occasionally a spark flaked away to vanish in a fiery streak. It seemed that the airliner was suspended in limbo, timeless and formless. It was just such a setting a man needed, Miguel thought, to think of his future. Because in this setting, the future was completely, absolutely academic. You could have no sure knowledge that the earth had not vanished, leaving this tiny cocoon of life behind in the unlimited gulf of interplanetary space. And so theoretical a thing as a human future, with risings and retirings, meals, friendships, work, love—faith, hope and charity—could be regarded coldly and impersonally as something having no connection with the celestial I.

The first consideration was Nora. She would probably meet the plane in New York. His physical desire for her was a sharp hunger. But Nora wouldn’t be alone. She was, and he had to keep remembering it, just what J.C. called her: Artfilm’s Love Goddess. A valuable property simply didn’t disappear for an unspecified number of days in bed with her lover. This Ziegler would undoubtedly be with her, and there would surely be some studio hangers-on, the customary flotilla of them. So after nearly a year away from her he could only expect a small part of her time and attention when he reached New York.

Next, there was Karl Olinder. Karl was going to be bitterly disappointed by the unfinished script in the brief case. Perhaps, Miguel thought, he could make Karl understand why he had not been able to do any work. A faint hope, really. How could he make Olinder understand when he was unsure himself? Olinder had always been critical of Miguel’s working habits and this fiasco was the worst yet. For weeks on end he had not been able to write a line, had not been able to build the book out of the rough first draft stage. It tantalized and tortured him. And Hillyer Press had a stake in the book now. They had given a sizable advance strictly on Karl’s recommendation.

Judging by the empty feeling in my middle, Miguel thought with a twinge of disgust, I’m afraid to go home.

Home. The word kept cropping up where it had no business to be. Perhaps one day he would have a home—a place in Cold Water Canyon or maybe even a ranch in the San Fernando Valley near Frank Steinmetz’s forty acres. Money wouldn’t be a problem if he could stick to the screenwriting job.

Strange, he thought, that he had lived in so many places without ever feeling that he had a home. When he was a child he had imagined that everyone belonged somewhere. He had even been a little jealous of his friends because they had this something that he lacked. But even then he had never doubted that he would find such a place for himself. He had been so sure it was only a matter of time and that mystical quality adults spoke of as “maturity.”

He had understood that home wasn’t a place, exactly. It was a state of being. That made it harder to achieve because you had to rely on other people. But there were times—that summer of 1932 at Del Rio, for example—that it had seemed near at hand.

Remembering that summer now, Miguel understood that there are pivotal times in life. Times that determine the future course of living just as surely as topography determines the course of a stream or river. That summer must have been such a time for the Rinehart family.

He could remember the first time Essie brought Becky Coulter to the house on Fitch Mountain. Was it fate or design that Luis should be there that one weekend out of the summer? And when did Raoul see her first? It must have been sometime between July and early September, but Miguel couldn’t ever recall seeing his father and Becky in the same room. Not then. And Raoul wouldn’t have noticed her then, in any case. She was unstylish, to say the least, with her Dutch-cut hair and her long-waisted middies and navy-blue skirts. He remembered Luis taking her to one of the Del Rio dances. In late July. It must have been late July because it was after Billy Alberg blew the skin off his right hand with a cannon-cracker.

That was the way of dating those things at that age, Miguel thought. It was after Billy hurt his hand, so it was after the Fourth of July, and it was before the Collingwoods’ German shepherd bit Junior Freeborne on the buttock and his mother made him take down his pants in front of everyone while she painted the bite with arnica, because that happened around Labor Day after most of the summer residents had returned to the city.

Becky and Luis, Miguel thought, remembering his brother. Luis was the handsome one; just above middle height with a narrow head and thick black hair, dark skin and brown eves. Miguel had blue eyes and fair skin; the only family resemblance lay in the coarse cap of black hair and the thin aristocratic nose.

I always wanted to look like Luis, Miguel thought ruefully, and I never did. He wondered now if maybe, then, he had been a little afraid of Luis. Luis, a grown man of twenty-three, working for Raoul, dating Becky, laughing and dancing with an urbane charm.

Miguel had been thankful for Anson. It was to Anson that Miguel turned for guidance. It was Anson who showed him how to sand the wings of his scale-model Fokker D7 into an airfoil shape. It was Anson who taught him the Australian crawl. And it was Anson who gave him the run of the boxful of books he kept in his tent at Del Rio, the textbooks and reference books he had used in his last year at Cal, before transferring to the California School of Arts and Crafts.

With Anson’s books for guides, with Breasted and Suetonius for comrades, Miguel visited the far, beautifully named places of the world: Troy, Samarkand, the Valley of the Kings.

That July of 1932 came to an end in a blaze of midsummer heat at Del Rio. It grew too warm to walk, too warm to swim. Dogs lay panting on the gravel road, undisturbed by traffic. The summer houses lay creaking and silent in the breathless air.

Anson lay in the hammock strung between the two madronas outside the kitchen windows and Miguel sat on the ground, picking at a trail of ants with a twig of hazelnut.

Miguel had just finished Anson’s copy of The Lives of the Twelve Caesars. He drove the twig into the ground and said, “Golly, Anson, I liked the one about Gaius Caligula.”

Anson laughed tolerantly. “Perfect example of the ills of hereditary kingship.” He dragged his feet to slow the hammock and said, “Look, when you’re a little older, I’ll give you some other stuff to read. History is okay, you can learn from history. But you want to absorb a little social theory. Thorstein Veblen and Karl Marx. The blueprints,” he added somewhat sententiously, “of the world of the future. The kind of world you’ll live in, kid.”

To Miguel, the notion that he would actually live in The World of the Future was exciting. It brought to mind great shining cities with aerial highways and crowds of people in jumping belts like those in Buck Rogers and sides filled with strange-looking craft, like arrows.

“Have you given any thought to what you want to be when you grow up, lad?” Anson asked.

Miguel unconsciously brushed his hair back with his fingers as his father had taught him to do. “I don’t know, Anson. An archaeologist, maybe.”

“Pottering around in old graves isn’t for you, kid,” Anson said.

“Maybe an aviator, then,” Miguel suggested, hoping for Anson’s approval.

“Anyone can learn to fly, lad. Even old man Eubanks learned to fly. That’s a skill, not a profession.”

Miguel shook his head in perplexity. “I guess I don’t really know yet. What are you going to do, Anson? Keep on designing houses?”

Anson reddened. “Don’t get smart-alecky,” he said. “I get enough of that from Essie.”

“I’m sorry,” Miguel said. “I didn’t mean it the way it sounded.” The searing sun filtered through the treetops, dappling the house with light and shadow. Miguel could hear Concha singing softly as she prepared the afternoon meal. Somewhere, down by the river, a snipe shrilled.

Anson lay back and let himself be mollified. “You ought to start thinking about the future,” he said. And then, in a voice tinged with Weltschmerz, he added, “Sometimes you wait too long. How old are you now?”

“Eleven and a half. Almost twelve.”

“Well, it’s not too early to think about things, laddo. Take it from me. What are you interested in?”

Miguel felt rather foolish saying, “Just about everything, I guess.” But it was true. It seemed to him that this summer he was seeing the world for the first time and there was no part of it without interest for him.

“But what do you like to do?”

“I like to draw,” Miguel answered tentatively.

“Ever think about commercial art? Sandy Johnson’s old man is a CA.”

“A what?”

“Commercial artist, kid. They get along all right, don’t they?” Miguel doubted that the Johnsons got along all right. Sandy never had any money. Somebody always had to treat him when they went to the Del Rio store. And if Sandy couldn’t even buy a Nehi without having to borrow the money, Mr. Johnson must be pretty poor.

Anson took out a pipe and filled it self-consciously. He hadn’t been smoking very long. Tm talking to you the way an older brother would, kid. You have a good mind. I’d hate to see you waste it.”

Miguel felt warm inside, but modesty compelled him to say, “I don’t get very good grades in arithmetic.”

“Hell,” Anson said rakishly. “Arithmetic isn’t everything.”

“My father says it is. He says you have to know figures if you want to get along.”

“Your old man,” Anson said with a degree of grudging tolerance, “is a businessman, not a creative thinker.”

Miguel considered that. Presently he asked, “Are you and Essie going to get married?” It seemed to him that it would be the best of all possible things that could happen, having Anson for a real brother-in-law.

Anson studied his pipestem. A faint breeze rustled the madrona leaves with a whispering insistence. Miguel spread his open shirt to it gratefully and waited for Anson to answer him.

“Well, now,” Anson said finally. “You know Essie. Marriage is a serious step. Particularly when a man is expected to give up his political ideals.”

“Oh,” Miguel said.

“She ever say anything to you about it? Getting married, I mean?”

“Not to me. But she did talk to Luis.”

“And what did he have to say about the idea?”

“Well,” Miguel said unwillingly.

“Hell, lad. You can tell me.”

“He said you ought to get a job before you start talking to Essie about marriage. But you know Luis, Anson. I wish you would marry Essie.”

Anson reached down and tousled Miguel’s hair. “I have one Rinehart on my side, anyway.” He smiled knowingly and said, “There won’t be any worry about jobs in the fall. Just let’s get those Wall Streeters out of Washington.”

“You think I could get a job, Anson?” Miguel asked.

Anson laughed. “You? What do you want with a job?”

“Well, I wouldn’t mind having my own money, of course.

And I think I’d like to work on a magazine or a newspaper. That’s really what I’d like to do.”

“There are worse ideas,” Anson said.

“I like to write down what I see,” Miguel said thoughtfully. “Do you?”

“Yes. I keep a diary, you know. Not every day or anything like that. More a journal. Like Pepys.” Miguel studied Anson’s face for a moment, wondering whether or not Anson was preparing to laugh at him. Finally, he said, “I’m going to learn to type and be a writer.”

“It takes more than typing,” Anson said. “You have to live,” he said mystically.

Encouraged, Miguel declared, “Oh, I’m going to.”

“I mean really live,” Anson said. He regarded Miguel appraisingly for a moment. “You like girls, kid?”

Miguel was nonplussed. “Sure, I guess so, Anson. They’re okay.” Actually, he didn’t know any girls except Essie. The ones in school either confused him or repelled him.

Anson tapped the pipestem against his teeth and finally said, “I imagine you’re rather on the young side yet. But you’ll learn.” He sighed heavily. “We all learn the hard way.”

Miguel felt uncomfortable. He struck at a beetle plunging like a microscopic tank across the rough, leaf-strewn ground.

Presently, he said, “You’re the only one I’ve ever told about my journal, Anson. Don’t mention it to Essie, please?”

“Mum’s the word, kiddo,” Anson said smiling. “Between us men.”

Miguel expanded visibly. He wanted to say something pleasant to Anson. “Essie really likes you,” he said. “I mean she’s stuck on you. Essie stands up for you all the time.”

Anson assumed a mask of indifference. “Your old man, I suppose.”

Miguel felt a pang of guilty disloyalty. Since Anson had become one of his lesser gods, it troubled him that Raoul had nothing good to say about him.

“Dad doesn’t dislike you, Anson,” he lied. “He was a little angry about what happened with the house. The money, you know, and everything—” Anson’s expression grew pained and Miguel hurried on, compounding the untruth. “He really thinks you’re a very promising young man.” The enormity of the prevarication shook Miguel to the core and he stopped short.

“Ha, ha,” Anson said hollowly.

Miguel decided to change the subject. He was already becoming adept at guiding a discussion around conversational shoals.

“Anson, do you believe in God?”

Anson laughed urbanely.

“Mother says I shouldn’t ask about such things. You don’t have to answer me if you don’t want to.”

“Ask away, kid. I’m at your service,” Anson said, letting the hammock rock gently.

“Well, Essie is Catholic—”

“She sure is,” Anson said fervently.

“And Concha, too. They go to Mass and all that. I’ve gone with them. But the thing I don’t see is how they know that what the Fathers say is all true. Most of the prayers are in Latin and the Fathers mumble so and Essie and Concha don’t know any more Latin than I do—” Miguel shrugged in perplexity.

“Religion isn’t meant to be understood, kid,” Anson said darkly. “It’s the opiate of the masses.”

“It’s what?”

“You’ll get the picture when you read Marx. You’ll see. It’s all so beautifully simple. Everything fits.”

“I guess,” Miguel said probingly, “that Karl Marx was a pretty great man.”

“It took the Soviets to appreciate him. His writings are like a light in a dark world, kid.” Anson’s pipe had gone out and he puffed it alight furiously.

“A really great writer?” Miguel asked humbly.

“Writer, philosopher, dialectician. A great social planner,” Anson said with feeling. “A truly great human being.”

“As great as Mary Baker Eddy?”

Anson stared at Miguel with shocked disapproval.

“The discoverer of Christian Science,” Miguel prompted.

Anson raised his eyes to the treetops. “Ye Gods,” he breathed disgustedly. His pipe went out again and he put it in his pocket. “How about going in the house, kid, and seeing what’s keeping your sister Esther.”

The summer wore on; July gone and a sultry August beginning. Time on the river passed with a slow and dreamlike tempo. There were days of activity, swimming and roaming with Tom and Billy, but there were other days when it seemed that the sun hung motionless in the sky, burning down into the green water, illuminating the depths with a shadowless light.

There was in him, Miguel sensed, a drive to solitude, even in the flush of this burgeoning summer. So when he couldn’t see Tom, and felt too restless to read, he would slip away from Concha to wander along the shore of the river, splashing in the rocky pools, feeling the hot sun on his bare legs and back, and the warm firmness of the sand under his naked feet.

He made long entries in his journal, sometimes illustrating them with sketches. The whiplike green motion of a watersnake, the shape of a madrona leaf, the low flashing light of a snipe.

Concha and Maria disliked his wanderings, but he had become adept at evading them and he managed to range as he pleased.

He liked to hide himself in the glade of wallows and watch the bathers from the French resort, the Villa du Soleil, romping in the shallows.

People of all ages, from toddlers to grandfathers, ran and shouted and splashed in the water. Their exuberant laughter rang across the river and their voices were a babble of strange sounds and inflections.

They would leave their fleet of battered buses on the gravel road and plunge down the steep banks toward the river in a noisy avalanche, laden with baskets of food and wines.

They were loud, contentious, and unfailingly delighted with themselves and their surroundings.

With unrestrained enthusiasm, they danced and sang and drank their red wine and spread their picnic cloths on the rocks.

The women were dark and most of them were fat and clumsy-looking, their flesh overflowing their black woolen bathing suits. They all seemed to be having such a fine time that Miguel often wished he dared join them. Instead, he contented himself with remaining the hidden observer, savoring the delicious feeling of omniscience it gave him.

It was like looking through a telescope at people far away, watching them while they went about their tasks not knowing that they were being observed by someone protected by distance and anonymity.

There were other days when the beach lay still and empty with the murky water flowing past it silently, stirring the half-submerged branches of the willows.

Miguel would sit in the glade and watch the river, wondering how he could ever describe in words the things he saw in that riparian stillness. Or tiring of that, he would stand on the beach and skip flat rocks on the water, watching them strike the surface once, twice, three times, making a thin splash each time and a complex of concentric and interlocking ripples.

And there were days when the sun hid behind a high, thin cloud layer, and he cast no shadow as he walked along the water’s edge. Strange days, with a muted tension in the air as though all the world and the river were listening for some far-off, marvelous sound, a cry of ecstasy that was surely coming soon, soon.

On such a day as that he ranged once far beyond his usual haunts. Billy was in town with his mother and Tom had gone to Gumeville with Oliver. Concha was busy with some household duty and Maria was drowsing on the sundeck. The house lay creaking in the shadowless heat, and the book he was reading couldn’t hold him. He felt restless and too warm. He slipped his pad and pencil into the pocket of his denim shorts and walked down to the river.

The sun’s outline was a brilliant haziness behind the high clouds. He covered his eyes with one hand and looked into the sky through his fingers. Arrows of fire seemed to pierce his skull but he kept looking until the tears streamed down his cheeks.

Presently, he looked away and closed his eyes watching the red and orange afterimages floating behind his closed lids.

He walked to the water and bathed his face until his eyes felt cool again, then he turned upstream and began to run.

At the glade, he stopped and drew a picture of a skull and crossbones and left it for Tommy or Billy or Sandy to find, then he wandered on, more slowly now. Frenchman’s Beach was empty, dead embers of last Sunday’s cooking fires lay black in their tiny Stonehenges of rocks. He waded into the water, digging his toes into the silt bottom, watching the dark, muddy clouds billow around his knees and drift slowly away downstream.

A short distance from the beach were the shallow rapids and he waded across the river there, teetering on the slippery rocks. Frogs made startled splashes, leaping for the safety of the water as he passed. A pair of brown and black-and-white snipes took to the air and wheeled down the river, flying low over the water, their cries echoing into the tangled woods.

He stepped onto the beach and picked his way through the scrubby brush. Ahead lay Eagle Rock and the Albergs’ house and beyond that, the Whirlpool. He passed the house quietly and skirted the sheer face of the big rock. He knew the shale hills back from the river, but the river gorge itself was unfamiliar because they had all been warned to stay away from the Whirlpool. He paused for only an instant and then continued upstream.

The Whirlpool itself looked much less dangerous than its reputation. It eddied sluggishly in the strange afternoon light, bits of leaves and trash and froth rotating lazily on the surface of the water.

Miguel stood on a rock and studied the route ahead. There would be difficulty in continuing, for the brush now grew right down to the water and he would have to crawl on his hands and knees through it or leave the river completely and climb the shale bluff to look for a trail.

He looked up at the sun. It couldn’t be later than two o’clock, he thought. Though it was hard to tell in the hazy, stifling afternoon.

He decided to go on exploring.

The brush was even thicker than it looked. He dropped to his hands and knees and crawled. The sand was rough and hot. Cobwebs clung to his face and he brushed them away with distaste. He stopped and lay panting in the heat. Ahead of him, through the lattice of stems and branches, he could see a clearing.

He pushed ahead, now dropping to his belly and wriggling through the dense undergrowth. He felt dry and uncomfortable and very thirsty.

Finally, he reached the edge of the brush and lay looking out of the rough cover at a tiny, secluded cove. The willows grew thick all around it, screening it on three sides. There was a well-defined trail leading out of the woods under the bluff. It wound through the beach grass, past Miguel’s vantage point, and over a slight rise of sandy ground to the river.

He started to get to his feet to inspect his find when the sound of low voices startled him. Voices and then whispers and soft laughter. Miguel dropped back onto his belly. There were two people on the beach. At first he thought they were a man and woman from the Villa, but as they rolled grotesquely together, he saw that they were Mr. Alberg and Ella Eubanks.

They lay on the sand, their breath coming in regular, grunting sighs. Mrs. Eubanks’ dress was in a roll around her waist, making her look infinitely more naked than mere nudity could ever have done. Mr. Alberg wore only a shirt and his legs looked thin and white, like the legs of some sort of fowl.

Mrs. Eubanks’ thigh, thick and pale and soft-looking, pressed against Alberg’s side. Her large buttocks flattened under her weight in the sand. Occasionally, she would reach up, putting her hands low on Alberg’s waist, to pull him to her with a liquid, moaning cry.

Miguel lay rigid, afraid to make a sound. The brassy sky and the oppressive heat seemed to press down on him, squeezing the breath from his lungs. He watched them, shaken by a dreadful excitement. Their undulating movements were like some land of conflict. The whole scene reminded him of a picture he had seen somewhere, but watching them made him feel lightheaded and he could not remember.

Their movements became more rapid, more breathless. The violent thrusting of body against body increased the sense of conflict. He heard Ella cry out in a strangled voice. The adult world grew suddenly immense and incomprehensible. Frightened, Miguel backed away, twisting about to push through the brush. He heard Mr. Alberg shout, “Who’s there? Dammit, who’s there?” but he did not stop. As soon as he could he stumbled to his feet and began to run back down the river, away from the hidden cove and the two sweating, moaning people on the sand.

He did not stop until he fell breathlessly into the willow glade by Frenchman’s Beach. He sat down and hung his head, drawing in great gulps of air. He went to the river’s edge and lay there, drinking water slowly and then washing his face and neck.

He was no longer frightened. He could see no reason to be. Mr. Alberg hadn’t seen him.

He sat looking thoughtfully across the languid current. He was not sure what it was that he had seen, but he knew it for something remarkable. He had had a tantalizing instant of awareness that was as suddenly gone. He shook his head in puzzled annoyance. He could not account for his fright.

Yet, there had been something fear-making in that writhing contest.

Miguel took out his sketch pad and drew a picture. It did not convey at all what he had seen in the cove. He tried several times and failed. He destroyed each effort. It was late afternoon when he found his way home and began searching through the books cluttering his part of the sleeping porch.

Finally, he found what he wanted. It recaptured the moment for him perfectly. He took the book out under the madronas with his journal, and using the picture as a guide, he sketched the scene on a blank page in graphic detail. Then, under the drawing, he wrote a meticulous account of what he had seen.

When he had done, he lay back, holding the picture book above his head, studying the painting. It was Michelangelo’s rendering of Leda and the Swan.

In later years, when he thought of the incident in the cove and the half-innocent unwisdom of describing it in his journal, he was filled with a sense of wonder at the naive assurance of eleven-year-olds that their possessions will always remain inviolate.

Viewed in perspective, however, the encounter had its element of humor. Years later he was still smiling at the classical twist of thought that had led him to equate Ella Eubanks with the wife of a Spartan king, and Martin Alberg with—of all things—Zeus in the form of a swan.

The incident in the cove haunted and disturbed Miguel. He wanted to talk to Anson about it, but he couldn’t. And to mention it to Essie would have been unthinkable. In the end, with unconscious irony, he was forced to turn to Tom for information.

He sat in Tom’s room at Eubank Onus, afraid he would see Ella, and wondered how to broach the subject. As time passed, he grew more ill-at-ease until at last Tom commented on it.

“What’s eating you, anyway? You look like you’re sitting on an ant-hill.”

Miguel could hear Ella moving around on the sleeping porch. He could close his eyes and see her, lying half-naked and fleshy on the sand. He swallowed and said, “Let’s go down to the beach.”

Tommy shrugged. “Okay. Let me tell my mom.”

Miguel flushed and jumped to his feet. “I’ll meet you on the path.”

He would not speak until they reached the willow glade. He threw himself to the ground and lay half out of breath while Tommy studied him in perplexity.

Remembering all too clearly the clandestine atmosphere surrounding the incident on the beach, Miguel was drawing on a rapidly developing creative faculty to embroider, in his mind, a story containing the essential facts while withholding the identity of the people involved.

Tom squatted curiously on the ground beside him and asked, “Well, now what’s the matter with you, anyway?”

Miguel drew a deep breath and began to tell a complicated tale of having followed a man and woman from the Villa to the secret beach. He stumbled badly when he described the woman’s state of nudity, but he finished in a rush and waited for Tommy’s reaction.

It wasn’t what he expected.

Tom let out a whoop of laughter and doubled up, slapping his knee.

“Well, what’s so funny?” Miguel asked sulkily. “How about letting me in on it?”

“Spicko! You mean you don’t know?”

Miguel, shamed, shook his head.

“Holy cow, Rinehart—where have you been all your life?”

“I said I didn’t know,” Miguel said stiffly.

“The Frenchies were—” he lowered his voice—“screwing.” Miguel looked blankly at him. “They were what?”

Tommy looked at him as though he were going to choke with suppressing his laughter. “Making babies,” he said.

Miguel sat up unbelievingly. “You mean that makes babies?”

“What do you think, anyway? That you find babies under cabbage leaves, for chrissake?”

“Well, no, but—”

“But me no buts, kiddo. Old Uncle Tom knows what he’s telling you.”

Miguel’s confusion was complete. He could see no possible reason for Tom’s mother to want to make a baby with Mr. Alberg. He had often heard Ella complain about the trouble of raising “a wild Indian of a boy” and declare that she wouldn’t have another child for anything.

Tom sat down beside Miguel. “I can prove it, kiddo.” His face looked red and moist in the summer heat.

Miguel scratched his bare leg thoughtfully. “How?” he asked.

“Easy as pie. But you have to promise not to tell.”

“I wouldn’t tell, Tom.”

“Swear it.”

“I said I wouldn’t.”

“You won’t ever say a word about this? Not even to Billy or Sand?”

Miguel nodded. He felt a stirring of excitement.

Tommy looked around. Frenchman’s Beach was empty and there was no one on the river, but he said, “Not here. Come on.”

“Where are we going?”

“Never mind. Just come on.”

They crossed the river at the rapids and clambered up the bank into the vineyards. Tommy led the way, ordering Miguel to keep low. “We got to be careful. If my old man ever found out about this, Jeez-zuz—”

They crawled between the grapestakes, Miguel growing more concerned by the minute. They hadn’t penetrated this far into the vintner’s land since the time he chased them with his salt-and-pepper gun. Finally, Tommy reached a hollow in the slope protected on all sides by heavy foliage. He wriggled back into the shade of a large vine and settled down, satisfied. “Remember, Spick. A promise is a promise,” he said solemnly. “I wouldn’t do this for any living soul but you.”

“I understand, Tom.”

“Now you have to keep still. No talking, see?” Tom opened his fly. Miguel could see the sparse growth of hair on his pubis. He, himself, was quite hairless there and the comparison made Tom seem much older.

“What are you going to do, Tom?”

“I said no talking, for chrissake!”

Miguel looked away uncomfortably, embarrassed for his friend.

Tom’s face grew ruddy with his exertions.

“Doesn’t it hurt?” Miguel asked in a low voice.

Tommy was panting vigorously. Presently, he was shaken by a spasm.

“Holy cow,” Miguel breathed.

Tommy grinned triumphantly. “Well, wise guy?”

Miguel could find no words. The scene he remembered in the secret cove now took on an altogether different significance. He had a vivid memory of the flushed pleasure on Tommy’s face.

Tom was kneeling now and buttoning his fly. He stretched and laughed. “Goes to show you you can’t learn everything from books, doesn’t it, Spick?”

In that moment, Miguel, though not yet a man, was absolutely and irretrievably lost to childhood. Years later, when they were both at Roslyn and Miguel was learning to play with words, he spoke of that afternoon to Tom as “a triumph of the empiric method.”

FIVE

At Shannon Airport the passengers deplaned in a straggling line with the wind howling and snatching at their clothing. It was after midnight; the flight had been delayed by headwinds and unfavorable weather.

The stewardess had said they would have thirty minutes in Shannon and Miguel had been ready simply to stay aboard the airplane and wait it out. He was tired and stiff already from drowsing in his seat. But the airplane was being serviced and the girl had been politely insistent that he join the rest of the passengers inside the concourse.

He stood up and put on his trenchcoat and for a moment he stood in the doorway of the airplane looking at the Irish night. The green-and-white beacon rotated atop the control tower; jeeps and fuel trucks with their headlamps on moved about the concrete ramp. Down the line a BOAC Stratocruiser was loading passengers. It could be any airfield, he thought, anywhere. The one really remarkable tiling about the Air Age was its standardization. He turned up his collar and walked through the blustery darkness toward the lights of the terminal.

Lieutenant Artigue met him just inside the concourse. He had been to the liquor store where whisky and gin could be bought without paying taxes and the pockets of his military greatcoat bulged and gurgled.

“You’re ready to begin your holiday, I see,” Miguel said.

The Belgian tapped his pockets significantly. “I look forward to a pleasant stay.”

“Good luck to you.”

“Please, I insist. A drink before leave-taking.”

“If you’ll let me buy,” Miguel said, suddenly thinking that he would have to get out of the habit of picking up tabs at least until some money began to come in.

They drank two Irish whiskies at the bar with a steaming mug of bitter coffee standing by for Miguel.

“Your home is in California, M’sieu Rinehart?” the lieutenant asked.

For a moment, Miguel was at a loss for an answer. Then he said, “San Francisco.”

“Ah, San Francisco. It is a city I have often wished to see. Cable cars. I have heard of them. They climb the so-steep hills with ease.”

“Well, with some ease,” Miguel said.

“And the bridges. They are famous the world over. One day, perhaps, I shall visit your city.” He shrugged. “But for now—” He tapped his pockets and smiled. “I must be content.” He extended his hand. “I shall remember our meeting, m’sieu, with pleasure.”

“And I,” Miguel said formally. “Vaya con Dios, Teniente.”

Artigue looked puzzled, but shook Miguel’s hand again. “Adieu, M’sieu Rinehart.”

Miguel watched him pick his way through the crowd toward the door marked in Gaelic: Fir. He vanished inside. Miguel studied the thorny letters. Underneath the Gaelic, in English, was printed the translation: Men.

Perhaps two per cent of Eire knew Gaelic, and yet every single sign in the terminal was written in both languages, and even the arrivals and departures were announced in Gaelic as well as in English. The separatists and nationalists demanded it. It was just the sort of petty truculence in his fellow man that wearied Miguel beyond measure. It seemed to him that in an age of intercontinental bombers and thermonuclear devices it was a step in exactly the wrong direction.

He had seen the attitude everywhere: in the proud hostility of a Guardia Civil in Cataluña where he had gone to see if he could find where Anson lay buried, in the slogans painted on the walls in southern France and northern Italy—AMI GO HOME. The instinct for community in mankind seemed a myth. If anything, people seemed to have a mutual repulsion for one another. It was depressing to think of Dorrie growing into womanhood in such a world.

Still, he remembered the friendly face of a bookseller in Torino when Alaine asked for something of d’Annunzio’s. And her comic dialogue with J.C.—poor Jean defending the distemper of his countrymen by invoking the shades of Moliere and Montaigne while Allie accused him of looking like Gilles de Retz.

They had been happy that spring of 1947, Miguel thought. It had been a good, big time for them, with the want of Nora under control, Miguel’s book a success.

Euphoria, Miguel thought. I blunted the memory of Tom and Nora and all the rest of it with travel and excitement. I guess I always knew it couldn’t last.

Miguel drank the last of his coffee and lit a cigarette. At a table nearby, the honeymooners from his flight had engaged another American tourist in conversation.

“We rented a car for eighteen bucks a day,” the man said. “It’s the only way to see Europe.”

Miguel watched the trio with mild indifference. He wondered why it was that Americans were so obviously Americans wherever they went. Around these three glowed the familiar aura of electric refrigerators, drive-in movies, Ed Sullivan on television, and chrome-spangled Pontiacs.

Remembering the girl at the perfume counter at Orly, Miguel felt a pang of loneliness. No such aura clung to him. He was generally taken for a foreigner, no matter where he was. Yet, he thought sadly, I’m not only American, I’m a native son.

“I told Fred,” the woman was saying, “we ought to get away from tourists. I mean, if we wanted to see people from home we might just as well have spent our vacation at Balboa.”

The woman had a way of gesturing that reminded Miguel of Florian O’Connor, one of the girls Tom used to date when they were at Roslyn. Florian had a trick of posing herself carefully before the open hearth when she heard a car stop outside the house so that she would make a tableau when the maid opened the door. Tom never caught onto this trick of hers and it had irritated Miguel for months, right up to the time Florian dropped Tom for a boy from Montezuma School with a Buick convertible.

“It rained all the time we were in Paris,” the man said. “Every living day, it rained. So we cleared out. Jumped into the car and took off, just like we do at home.”

He accepted a cigar from his audience and paused to light it. “Drove through the château country. Never climbed so many damn steps in my life. Then we had a quick look at the Riviera. Kitten, here, went to Grasse, of course. Bought a couple of quarts of perfume. Lot cheaper there than at home, you know. And then—this is the best part—on the way to see that grotto down near Naples, see, we stop off to take a look at Pompeii—” He chuckled self-consciously. “Some little kids came up to Kitten, here, with some souvenirs—you know the kind I mean—” He glanced at his wife for permission to go on.

“Go on and tell him, Freddie,” Kitten said, tasting her highball. “You’ve been telling the story all over Europe. Why stop now?”

“Well,” Fred said, moving closer to his listener and lowering his voice. “These little shavers come right up to Kitten and say, ‘Cock and balls, signora? Veree good luck for lady.’ I tell you, Kitten damn near died. They really had some, too. Little ones made out of baked clay with MADE IN ITALY stamped on them. I bought some and sent them to the guys at the office for a joke. Without putting my name on the packages, of course.”

“I hope,” Kitten declared, “that’s the last time you tell that story. It wouldn’t go over so big in Pomona.”

“Don’t worry,” Fred said. “Don’t worry.”

The woman stood up and announced that she was going to powder her nose. “I can’t bear that horrid little cell on the plane.”

The two men watched her go, swinging her girdled hips.

Miguel let his imagination go on Fred and Kitten’s trip through Europe. Probably the aggressively American car, bulky on the narrow French roads, had more than managed to hold its own against those bullies of the Routes Nationales, the shrill-voiced Citroëns.

Miguel remembered the hair-raising élan with which every Light Fifteen had picked up the challenge of the old TA MG he and Alaine had bought in London with his first royalty check from Hillyer Press on The Canceled Skies. There had been something about the cocky gait of that little red two-seater that enraged the drivers of the ugly, yellow-wheeled Citroëns.

And Alaine, though she must have been seriously frightened, had been quite good about the endless series of impromptu road races that made up their journey across France from Calais to Nice.

Miguel remembered other things, as well, about that spring of 1947. Like a dark and windy night in Avignon, wandering through the confined, walled town, with no particular destination in mind and suddenly finding themselves in the square before the Palace of the Popes. Like stepping back in time six hundred years, he remembered.

Floodlights concealed behind the wind-whipped foliage had illuminated the stark fa9ade of the ancient building, and the dancing shadows were like the ghosts of all the lost penitents who had died behind those forbidding fortress walls.

They had stopped at the edge of the vast, empty square, both moved by the eerie grandeur of the scene. Alaine’s hand had sought his as the wind moaned and sighed among the crenels high above them.

They had walked slowly up the stone steps worn smooth by centuries and they had stood silently before the blind oaken doors, conscious of the weight of years. And that night, in their brass bed in the Hotel du Midi, they had clung together as if to assure themselves that love, and life itself, for that matter, was not a fleeting and impermanent thing in the ponderous chaos of time.

It had been that night that had led him to write his second book, The Exile—the book Olinder said would win him a place on the list of the good, and perhaps in time, better than just good, novelists of the postwar years.

Then he could remember a night in London, a night he had taken Alaine to Casa Pepe in Soho.

Pepe, who made a great thing out of kissing all the pretty women who came into his place, had done Alaine the honor and then had challenged Miguel to a Peruvian wine-drinking contest with one of those spigoted contraptions that allowed the wine to pour a thin jet into the mouth from arm’s distance. Miguel had done well enough to aim most of the wine into his mouth only to find Pepe pouring his onto his forehead and letting it run down over his nose and into his mouth in a genuine tour de force.

But the thing that had remained most clear in his memory was the Hindu girl, one of the diners, in caste mark and sari, who had begun to sing “La Paloma” in a soft and reedlike voice. She had sung without accompaniment, and the restaurant had fallen completely still and even the kitchen help had come out into the dining room to listen. And finally, when she had finished the song, everyone had shouted, “Olé!” and “Bravíssima!”

And in the taxi, on the way back to their hotel, Allie had put her head on Miguel’s shoulder and said, “I’ve never been happier.”

But the very next day, Becky’s cable arrived and they had to take the next plane for home, because Raoul was dying.

Miguel crushed his cigarette into the ash tray thoughtfully. There were so many things like that that time could not dull or diminish. Only what came after was bad. The series of false starts on the third book and then when it was done at last, the disappointing reviews and small sales so that when the first of the picture jobs, collaborating with Frank Steinmetz on the screen version of The Canceled Skies came up, there was no refusing it. And so he had gone south to Hollywood once, and then again, each time waiting for the inevitable meeting with Nora.

On the way back to the airplane, Miguel stopped at the airport communications desk and asked the attendant, a pretty girl in a green uniform, if there were any messages for him. She handed him two cables.

The first was from Karl Olinder. TOMORROW TWELVE THIRTY MY OFFICE DONT MAKE ANY LUNCH DATES ANXIOUS TO SEE THE NEW SCRIPT GLAD YOURE COMING HOME.

So Karl didn’t know about the job Ziegler was giving him with Artfilm. He had cabled Nora to break the news to Karl directly, or to tell Magnussen and let the agent do it. She either had not done as he asked, or she had relied on Magnussen and Magnussen had been reluctant to tell Karl, thinking that he might do something to prevent Miguel’s taking the job, at least until the promised book was delivered to Hillyer Press. One thing was very certain. Olinder wasn’t going to be happy about Miguel going out to the Coast to work on what he called “canned clap.” Miguel sighed and put the cable in his pocket.

The second cable was from Nora and shorter, WILL MEET PLANE LOVE YOU DARLING.

The attendant at the gate took his boarding pass and he walked head down against the wind back to the Constellation. The stewardess had put out pillows and blankets for the flight across the Atlantic. Miguel searched in his brief case for the bottle of Luminal he always carried while traveling and cursed slightly under his breath when he discovered he had only one capsule left. That was the trouble with a sudden trip. You always went half-prepared. He decided to save the capsule until a bit later. He had a feeling that he was going to need a night’s rest.

As the airliner taxied out to the end of the runway, Miguel could see peat fires burning in the nearby hills. They grew dim or bright at the whim of the wind and they reminded him of the fires that used to bum at night on Frenchman’s Beach.

The Villa people would gather around them and sing their songs, “Alouette” and “Allons, Mes Jolis Boeufs,” and the one he had always favored because he had memorized the words and could sing along with them: “Savez-vous planter les choux, à la mode, à la mode, Savez-vous planter les choux, à la mode de chez-nous?”

He used to sit back in the shadows, sometimes with Tom and sometimes alone, and sing softly. The pleasure he derived from this sort of thing was something Tom was always at a loss to understand, nor could Miguel explain it to him.

Ollie, Tom used to say, had learned some French songs when he was in France with the AEF that made a hell of a lot more sense than the sort of kid tunes the Villa Frenchies sang.

The strange thing about his early relationship with Tom, Miguel thought, watching the peat fires, was that in spite of the fact that there was so little similarity between them, they had always been together, each drawing something that was lacking in his own make-up from the other.

Tom complained about the waste of time sitting near the Frenchie beach and listening, but he was generally there. And Miguel often found himself bored by the endless series of physical feats demanded by Tom: racing across the river, lifting great stones, swinging like Tarzan from ropes hung in the madronas—but he almost always went along, wearying himself with senseless gymnastics because Tom got such pleasure out of beating him.

It lasted a long time, Miguel mused. Through prep school and even after Tom had gone south to USC and Miguel to Stanford, they had held together as friends, Miguel priming Tom’s mind with facts that could be had from books and Tom reciprocating with what he liked to call “know-how I picked up at old Hardknocks U.” Tom never developed a taste for Mozart or Marlowe and Miguel never learned to care for the program at the Kearney Burlesque, but both learned that each had its place.

Miguel closed his eyes as the pilots began their engine run-ups. The airplane bucked and strained to be free. After what seemed a long time, it squared away with the strip and Miguel could see the amber runway lights flashing past the window and feel the seat pressing against his back as the big Constellation lifted into the dark air.

On the last weekend of that summer of 1932 Miguel walked down to the willow glade to meet the others. Billy Alberg and Sandy were waiting for him, but no Tom.

Essie had invited some friends to Del Rio for the weekend and Miguel sat down and said disgustedly, ‘The house is full of girls. I even have to sleep on the sundeck.”

Billy and Sandy were sympathetic.

“They re all over the place,” Miguel said, digging his heel into the sandy ground. “Giggling and acting silly.”

“Girls are pretty stupid, all right,” Sandy said stoutly.

A humid heat rose from the river. Miguel could feel the cloying warmth of it on his skin. It made the sweat start and trickle down his spine. He seemed to have forgotten what cold weather felt like. It seemed to him that all this summer had been breath-stopping heat and the buzz of insects and the slow, somehow sensual tempo of the river.

He thought of the girls Essie had invited to the house. Becky, of course. And Ruth Snavely, who had arms like a man and wore no make-up. Sarah and Emily Burgoyne who sounded like parakeets when they laughed, and they laughed all the time. Patches was full of their frilly clothes and their wet bathing suits and they kept hiding and dressing and undressing all over the place so that a person had no place to go. Even Concha was so busy making them sandwiches and serving soft drinks that she had no time for anything else. Girls, Miguel thought resentfully.

“What time is old Tom coming?” he asked.

Billy shrugged. “Ought to be here by now.”

“Well,” Sandy said, “I wish he’d get off the dime.”

They settled down to wait, throwing rocks into the river, aiming at a drifting stick of wood.

“Hey, did you guys see that? I hit it,” Billy yelled.

“Missed it a mile,” Miguel said.

They fell to talking about the end of summer.

“I hate to think of school again,” Sandy said.

Miguel thought about returning to Berkeley and his spirits sank even lower. He thought of the dark polished wood of the Ampico, and the metronome ticking, and the dust motes dancing in the slanting rays of the sun coming through the windows while outside the neighborhood children played. It was going to be terrible to go back to that confining life again after this summer. He remembered the portrait of Don Miguel de Castaña y Lopez. He was named for Don Miguel, the Spanish grandee ancestor of Maria’s. He glanced covertly at Billy and Sandy. He was certainly glad they didn’t know his full name. Spick was bad enough, but Miguel José Maria de Castaña Rinehart—

Miguel sighed gloomily. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad living as a Spaniard in Spain, or even in Mexico. But in Berkeley, California, U.S.A., it was terrible. It would be even worse after this summer’s taste of freedom. He found himself hating the dark, shadowy figure in the portrait and wishing something would happen to break the pattern of life in town into about- a million pieces so that he could live just the way the rest of the kids lived.

“Hey, you guys,” he said half-heartedly. “My dad bought a boat.”

“What kind of a boat?” Sandy wanted to know.

“I haven’t seen her.”

Billy Alberg said, “My mom thinks boats are dangerous.”

“Not this one,” Miguel declared, reassured by their interest. “My dad knows about boats. It’s more like a ship, anyway.”

“A ship,” Sandy said, impressed.

“Well, not like an ocean liner or anything like that. But she’s fifty feet long and has bunks and everything.”

“Holy cow, Rinehart,” Sandy said enviously. “That sounds like the cat’s meow.”

Billy Alberg shrugged indifferently. “That’s not any ship.”

“Well,” Miguel said testily. “What would you call it? A skiff?” He turned back to Sandy, thinking that he had always liked Sand a lot better than Billy, anyway. “She’s called the Nereid. She has a new diesel motor. Dad’s going to keep her at the St. Francis Yacht Club. Maybe we could all go on her some Sunday this fall. My dad would let us.”

Sandy Johnson, whose situation in life had already conditioned him to accepting such offers graciously, said promptly, “That would be swell, Spick. We could have a terrific time, I’ll bet.”

“I’ll mention it to my dad,” Miguel said, feeling much better. It pleased him to be able to say this because Billy had asked him about Raoul early in the summer and when Miguel had explained that Raoul and Maria were “separated” Billy had acted as though there were something disgraceful about it.

The subject of the boat, however, was rapidly played out, since Miguel actually knew very little about it. They subsided into torpid silence.

“Junior Freeborne told me he heard about a fellow who died from eating poison oak,” Miguel said irrelevantly. Junior Freeborne, though considered rather effeminate and something of a mama’s boy, was four years older than they and acknowledged to be pretty intelligent. His observations were sometimes worthy of attention.

“Holy cow,” Sandy said. “Wouldn’t that be a way to torture some guy? Make him eat a whole lot of poison oak so he’d get all raw and swollen up inside and die?”

Miguel sat in silence, thinking about someone eating poison oak and dying. He could imagine a corpse floating in the blood-warm river, its eyes staring straight up at the sun without blinking while the chiggers burrowed into the putty-like flesh. The thought made him a little sick.

The subject of exchanging visits during the winter came up. The Albergs lived in Piedmont—not too far from the Berkeley line and Maria’s house. Sandy’s folks lived in San Francisco, and Tom’s in Oakland. Miguel knew, with a precocious intuition, that these visits would never occur. Possibly old Tom and he would get together, but this continuous exchange of visits that Sandy and Billy were talking about wouldn’t come to anything.

“You’d like my dad’s place, Spick,” Sandy said. “He has a studio. You know those Dairy Dell milk ads you always see in magazines? The ones with Sister Bossy the Cow in them? He draws those. I bet he’d even draw you, if I asked him. Maybe put you in one of the ads,” he finished generously.

“That would be keen,” Miguel said.

Sandy sighed. “Why does summer have to end, anyway?”

“It can’t always be summer,” Miguel said.

“I know,” Sandy said mournfully.

“What time is it?” Billy asked.

“I don’t know,” Sandy said. “Maybe around noon.”

“Wonder what’s holding old Tom up,” Billy said.

“Tom said he was going to go off the high platform at the dam today,” Miguel said.

“Haw. I want to see that,” Billy declared. “Tom talks big.”

“He’s pretty good,” Sandy said. “I just wish I could swim like he does.”

“I’m getting tired of waiting.” Billy got to his feet and brushed the dead willow leaves from his trunks.

“Let’s walk up to the road,” Sandy suggested. “We can meet him there.”

They started up the trail Indian file. Sandy scratched industriously at his crotch. “I got bathing suit itch,” he said. “Bad.”

“Indian soap is good for that,” Billy Alberg said.

For some reason he could not fathom, Miguel’s spirits were sinking again. He felt irritable and he could not rid himself of the thought that this was the end of summer.

Sandy and Billy began to sing “Show Me the Way to Go Home.” They sang very badly and Billy didn’t know all the words. Miguel was glad when they reached the road and stopped.

Tom was walking down the shoulder, scuffing his feet and raising a dust cloud in the still air.

“About time, Eubanks,” Billy said.

“We were packing,” Tom declared. “We re leaving tonight.”

Miguel said incredulously, “Tonight?”

“Sure.” Tommy was different, somehow. Not so friendly. As though he were already apart from the rest of them—on his way home. “Ollie wants to get going before all the Sunday drivers get on the road.” He kicked at a rock and sent it bounding down the gravel road.

Miguel looked resentfully at him. He actually seemed glad to be going.

“We go through Santa Rosa. That’s quicker than the Napa way.”

“My mom always goes through Calistoga,” Sandy said. “We get to see the geysers.”

Tom nudged Miguel and said to Sandy, “Say, Johnson, tell me how come you don’t have a place of your own up here like everybody else. Don’t you get tired of having to stay at Billy’s all the time, like a poor relation or something?”

Miguel was taken aback by the cruelty of the remark. He had never heard Tom speak to Sandy that way. It was one of those things you just never talked about.

“We’re not so poor as all that,” Sandy said in a low voice.

“Pretty lucky you have plenty of extra room at The Roost, hey, Alberg?” Tommy said.

“My mom and Sand’s mom went to school together,” Billy Alberg said charitably. “They’re friends.”

“I’m going to Stanford,” Tom said, “or down to USC.” He squatted down in the road with his towel rolled into a makeshift football and began to count. “Sig-nals! Twentytwo—thuttythree—fifty-five—hike!” He charged, his Keds digging into the gravel.

“You going to play football, Tom?” Sandy asked mildly.

Tommy looked at him pityingly. “What do you think? My old man wouldn’t send me to college if I didn’t, kiddo.” He circled back, running with his knees high. He fell in beside Miguel and clapped him on the back. “How about you, Spick?”

For some reason, everything Tom did today annoyed him. He said, “I wish you’d lay off that ‘Spick’ stuff.”

“It’s what everyone calls Spaniards.”

“I’m an American,” Miguel said doubtfully. “I was born in Berkeley.”

“Sure, but you’re a Spick, too,” Tom said. “Tell us some cuss words in Spanish, will you?”

“I don’t know many,” Miguel said.

“What does fangula mean?” Sandy asked.

“Ask the Pavonis. It’s Italian.”

“Boy, boy,” Tommy said, winking at Miguel. “This kid reads books, I tell you.”

Miguel gave Tom a dark look, taking his words for a reference to what happened that day in the vineyard.

“Come on, Spick, please,” Sandy said. Why, Miguel wondered moodily, did everyone have to fall in with Tom’s ideas today. He was going away, wasn’t he?

“Give us the words, maestro,” Tom said.

Miguel complied cautiously. He had sometimes caught Concha in unguarded moments. “But don’t you say any of these in front of her,” he warned. “She’ll know who taught you.”

“Chinga tu madre!” Tommy shouted delightedly.

“Take it easy, will you?” Miguel said angrily. “That’s nothing to go yelling around.”

Tommy put an arm around Miguel’s shoulders as they walked. Miguel didn’t feel like being touched and wanted to move away from the weight and sweaty dampness of the other’s arm, but he submitted without protest.

“It’s been a hell of a summer, kiddo,” Tom said. “You be up again next year?”

Miguel felt more than ever deserted and resentful. From the way Tom talked they wouldn’t see one another until they met again here. For the first time, Miguel came to understand just how much he had been counting on his friendship with Tom to make up for not belonging among the town kids.

“I don’t know,” Miguel said. “Maybe.”

They had to move into single file as a car passed them. Miguel moved away from Tom.

“I’ll tell you what,” Tom said. “Sometime this fall we can all get together and my old man will take us to see the Cal-St. Mary’s game. Or maybe even the East-West on New Year’s. My old man is a high mucky-muck in the Shriners and he can get all the tickets he wants. How would that be?”

Miguel thought of the months between the end of summer and New Year’s Day and said hollowly, “Sure, swell.”

“Any of you guys for Cal?” Tommy asked.

“I’m for California,” Miguel said. Actually, what football sympathies he did have were with Stanford, but he felt contrary.

“Hell, I forgive you,” Tommy said good-naturedly. “You’re a Spick and you don’t know any better.”

Miguel felt a hard knot of anger in his stomach.

They walked in silence for a time. In the distance they could hear the shouts of the swimmers at the dam. More cars passed them and Tommy held out his thumb. The drivers did not stop and the four boys continued through the dust clouds raised by the passing automobiles.

“Bastards,” Tommy breathed.

“They didn’t have any room for us anyway,” Miguel said.

“We could have stood on the running board, couldn’t we? Chrissake, I’m getting thirsty.”

“We’re almost there,” Billy said unnecessarily.

“I saw Anson drive by this morning with your sister Esther,” Tommy said to Miguel. “Hot doggy.”

Miguel’s anger smoldered. He felt constrained to explain. “Mother sent them into town to pick up Ruth Snavely in the Lincoln.”

“You think the Lincoln is a better car than a Studebaker?” Sandy asked.

Miguel did, but he knew that their Lincoln was three years old and the Studebaker Sandy was referring to was the Albergs’ which was new.

“I guess maybe it is.”

“I don’t,” Billy Alberg said quickly.

“It’s a matter of opinion, wouldn’t you say?” Miguel said in a cold voice.

Tom said to Sandy, “Say, by the way, kiddo, you got any money?”

“Some,” Sandy said noncommittally.

“How much?”

“Enough, I guess.”

“Enough to pay back the two bits you borrowed three weeks ago?”

Sandy was silent. Miguel could sense his thirst waging a battle with his sense of what was proper. Propriety won after a struggle. Sandy swallowed hard and fished into the tiny pocket of his swimming trunks. He handed Tommy two dimes reluctantly. “Here, that’s all I have. Take it.”

Miguel looked at Tommy. Tom said, “What about the rest of it?Remember, were leaving early tomorrow.”

“I said that’s all I’ve got,” Sandy said in a low voice.

Miguel asked, “Is that really all you’ve got, Sand?”

“I said so, didn’t I? I’ll get the rest of it from my mom. She’s coming down to the beach with Aunt Lillian.”

Miguel felt the weight of the half-dollar in his own pocket guiltily. He felt peculiar having money now while Sandy had none. “I can lend you some, Sand,” he said.

“Mom will give me some,” Sandy said, kicking at the dust.

“A nickel for a Nehi, anyway?”

Tommy banged him on the back and yelled, “Nehi for a nickel, how high for a dime?” He laughed uproariously.

Miguel would not look at him. How, he wondered, could he ever have thought of Tom as a friend?

They walked into the Del Rio store and bought soft drinks. Sandy remained outside, sitting on the steps. When Miguel got his change, he tried to give Sandy a dime, but Sandy pushed the coin away angrily. Miguel went back inside and bought a Nehi. He brought it out and put it on the step beside Sandy. “You have to drink it,” he said roughly. “It’s already open.”

Sandy gnawed on his lip and stared out at the road. Slowly, as if of its own volition, his hand found the bottle. “Ill pay you back,” he said in a low voice. “Ill get some dough from my mom.”

Miguel couldn’t think of anything to say, so he went back inside. Tommy was stocking up on candy. There was a crumpled dollar bill and eighty-five cents in change on the counter. Miguel watched him gather it up. He was shaken by a surprising spasm of indignation. The cool air of the store seemed suddenly suffocating.

“You mean,” he heard himself say, “you had all that money and you took Sand’s twenty cents, too?”

Tommy looked perplexed. “Sure. He owed it to me.”

Amazed, Miguel saw his fist reach out and strike Tom’s hand. It was like watching a movie of himself. The money went flying in all directions. A coin struck one of the big green-and-red glass beakers near the drug counter, tinkling musically and then falling to the oiled plank floor with a tiny, flat sound.

The storekeeper, Mr. Haushoffer, looked over the candy counter and said, “Here, here, none of that in here.”

Billy Alberg backed away. Miguel felt himself being carried along by a rushing torrent of anger and resentment and he was bewildered by his inability to resist it. His knees felt funny. Tommy looked very large and red in the face.

Mr. Haushoffer said, “Behave yourselves, boys. Do you hear me?”

Miguel stood as though his shoes had been nailed to the floor.

“What’s the matter with you, anyway?” Tommy asked in a hurt tone.

“You stink, that’s what the matter is,” Miguel said in a trembling voice.

“No fighting in here,” Mr. Haushoffer said, coming out from behind the candy counter.

“Well,” Tommy said truculently. “I just guess we better settle this outside, that’s all.”

“Fine with me,” Miguel said. He was sweating and his body felt clammy and cold. He wished his knees would stop feeling as though they were going to fold up.

“You just wait until I pick up my dough, then,” Tommy said.

“I’m waiting,” Miguel said.

He watched Tommy crawl on his hands and knees, retrieving the coins that had rolled under the counter and among the packages and barrels. Tommy’s buttocks looked huge.

Billy Alberg was on the floor helping Tom, his decision as to whom to back in the imminent conflict quite apparent.

Suddenly, Miguel could not understand what lapse of common sense could have driven him into picking a fight with the bigger boy.

“Well,” Tommy said, straightening finally, and tucking the money into his pocket, “well, okay.”

“Let’s go,” Miguel said stiffly, walking through the door.

Billy Alberg followed them out. “You guys really going to fight?” he asked.

“Yes,” Miguel said.

“You bet your boots,” Tommy said in a strange voice.

Sandy looked from one to the other in confusion. “Say, what’s the matter with you guys, anyway?”

“Let me hold your towel, Tom,” Billy said.

They walked around to the back of the building. “You guys shouldn’t fight,” Sandy said.

“We’re going to,” Miguel said.

“Damn right we are, kiddo,” Tommy declared.

They faced one another in an attitude of watchful waiting. Miguel’s throat felt dry and dusty and the soda pop he had drunk lay sweet and sickly in his stomach.

“Well, go on,” Billy said. “What are you waiting for?”

“Never mind the advice,” Tommy said in an unsteady tone, not taking his eyes from Miguel. “Just can the advice or I’ll take you on, too.”

Miguel suddenly realized that Tommy was as frightened of him as he was of Tom. And Tommy couldn’t hide it as well.

The circling and waiting became unbearable. Finally, Miguel lunged forward and swung his fist at Tommy’s chest. To aim at the face would have been unthinkable. But Tom’s evasive action was miscalculated and he bobbed his head into the path of Miguel’s blow. He caught it squarely on the nose.

His eyes filled and he began to cry.

Miguel felt a surge of triumph and he leaped forward, ready to strike again, but Tommy seized him in a stranglehold and wrestled him to the ground. They rolled about in the dirt, lacking and shoving. Presently Mr. Haushoffer appeared and pulled them apart, scolding angrily about fighting near the store.

Miguel looked at Tommy. Mud streaked his face where tears and dust had mixed. There were several scratches on his cheek. Miguel realized he, himself, must look as bad or worse. There was dirt in his mouth. He spat it out distastefully.

The storekeeper released them and said, “You going to cut this out?” Without waiting for an answer he went back into the store, grumbling to himself.

“You quitting?” Billy asked, disappointed.

“Sure,” Tommy said. “You want to fight—join the Marines, kiddo.”

Miguel felt relief flood through him. He felt lighter and somehow cleaner inside. He smiled slowly.

A grin broke through on Tommy’s tear-stained face. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

Billy and Sandy pushed them together. “Go on, you guys,” Sandy said. “Shake.”

“It was a good fight,” Billy said grudgingly, “while it lasted.”

Tommy took Miguel’s hand. Miguel felt a welling up of warmth and friendship. Why had they fought, anyway? Tom was his friend. Tom was his brother.

Tommy rubbed his nose. “I thought you’d busted my beak, Spick. That’s a real left jab you have.”

“You just ran into it.”

“Like hell,” Tommy said, eyeing Miguel speculatively. “I don’t think I want to fight with you any more, kiddo. No sir.” He moved closer and put his arm around Miguel’s shoulders. “From now on, we’ll do our fighting on the same side.”

Miguel felt the warmth inside him rising like a tide. Somehow he was sure that Tom felt the same thing. And then it became a sad thing, as though it were a voice, a whispering voice from a great distance away drifting mournfully across the dusty willows and the river. This was the last weekend of summer. The very last, Old Tom, and Sand, and Billy—

You had to savor it because it would never be the same again. Not ever. His eyes felt strangely hot and wet.

“Come on,” he said. “Race you guys to the river.”

SIX

He had been drowsing in his seat and he awoke long before dawn, thinking of death.

He had been dreaming of his mother, and the dream had been so clear, so sharply detailed, that it had survived the trauma of waking.

He had been sitting at her feet, a boy of eleven again, in the music room of the Rockridge house. She sat in one of the winged chairs under the portrait of Don Miguel in iron armor. She wore a plain black dress that he somehow recognized as the dress she had been buried in, and there was a high comb in her hair with a mantilla of black Spanish lace falling over her shoulders. Her face was pale and composed, with dark shadows under the eyes—eyes that somehow seemed to be as bottomless and black as the night. She was very beautiful, with firm white flesh and small hands and a full bosom swelling from the bodice of her dress. He could see the medallion she wore resting in the cleft of her breasts. She was in some way more youthful than he remembered her.

She held the family Bible open on her lap and she was reading to him. “To everything there is a season, and a time to everything under the heaven: a time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill and a time to heal—” He was aware of the strange and bell-like timbre of her voice in the stillness. For some reason he thought it was afternoon, but there was nothing outside save darkness, limning the stark, repetitive cross motif of the window frames. Now he noticed that the walls were bare, with the look of old polished bones. It was Christmas and there was a tree. A voice said: “A time to love and a time to hate, for God shall bring every work into judgment and every secret thing …” And, looking at his mother, he saw quite clearly that her lips were not moving and there were raw, red burns around her mouth. It frightened him and he tried to embrace her, only to feel the slick hardness of a clothing store mannequin beneath his hands. Then he had awakened thinking of death.

He gazed outside, still sodden with sleep and the residue of his last Luminal capsule. The airliner was flying fairly low over a dark sea.

He lit a cigarette and smoked half of it to get himself functioning. Then he went to the lounge and washed his face with cold water. His image in the vibrating mirror looked back at him, gaunt and hollow-eyed.

He opened the door and walked carefully between the sprawling rows of sleeping passengers to the buffet. He accepted a cup of steaming coffee from the stewardess and stood in the alcove drinking it.

The girl had a pretty French face with long eyes and a firm mouth.

“You don’t get much rest on these night trips, do you?” he said.

“No, m’sieu. There is always something to do.” She shrugged and added, “M’sieu did not sleep long.”

“No.”

She glanced at her wrist watch. “We are late, but we should be over the New England coast by first light.”

“Do we stop in Boston?”

“No, m’sieu. We fly directly to New York.”

Back in his seat once more, Miguel turned on the reading lamp and took the script from his brief case. It wasn’t a bad book, really, he told himself. It simply wasn’t good enough. And it was unfinished.

He thought briefly about the piece he had promised J. C. to do for Réaltiés and had left half-completed in Montparnasse. He had left the agent in a bad spot, but it couldn’t be helped. This was much more important. And just as unfinished.

He had meant it to be a companion piece to The Exile—a novel of hope as The Exile was a story of grief. But it hadn’t come off. The characters lacked depth and the situations seemed contrived and unreal. He hadn’t even thought of a title for it. On the cover page, he had scribbled in blue pencil, “Something of Auden’s?” And part of a verse: “In the night of fire and snow, save me from evil.”

Under the penciled lines was a sketch of the watchtower just off the esplanade at Rapallo. He remembered doing that while sitting on the balcony of the Gran Savoia on a sunny autumn afternoon. Sketching while he should have been working. He half smiled, thinking of Olinder sitting behind his golden oak desk at Roslyn, shaking his long, tobacco-yellowed finger and saying, “Michael, what have you been doing with your time?” Seen in perspective, Miguel mused, my writing career has described a short, descending arc. What was it literary types called a flash-in-the-pan writer? A morning-glory.

With the rumpled typescript in his lap, he closed his eyes and tried to remember more of the Auden. All he could bring back was a couplet from another poem: “The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews, Not to be born is the best for man—”

It made him think of Alaine. Her first gift to him had been a volume of Auden’s poems.

He thought of her in the beginning, in that apartment she had in 1943, the fine little place on Divisadero Street. He remembered the path you took between two of the clean, white old houses so typical of San Francisco, and then through a little patio with a lily pond where big orange fantails swam in the green water, and finally, the stark spiral steel staircase to a door perched just under the eaves of a pink stucco building with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge.

With a certain small satisfaction he thought about Alaine’s record collection. The records and player would have earned her a position of eminence in the high fidelity crowd if she hadn’t been ten years ahead of her time. In those days, he thought, people listened to music on their equipment instead of test-records filled with the sounds of tinging triangles and clacking woodblocks.

He had always liked that apartment. Feminine, without being frothy, it was the sort of place he imagined Allie Wylie might have had. Alaine had taste and money and the place showed both. After a long flight, or a day with General Kirbee, it was like another, less trying world.

The rent, he remembered, was high. How high, Alaine wouldn’t say. “You’ll think me extravagant,” she would tease, “and then you’ll never make an honest woman of me.” And in the end, when they married, she gave the place up to live in an apartment Miguel could afford on junior officer’s pay.

It had seemed precipitous, their establishing a so-domestic situation on such short acquaintance. But the thing you lost sight of, Miguel thought, staring out at the sea just now touched with a bluish, predawn light, was the rush of the war years. What happened to our generation was that we lost the last years of youth and the first years of manhood to the war. The forties now seemed as though they had never been.

Their affair had angered Billy, Miguel remembered, and pleased Tom. Once married, Tom turned his attention to getting Miguel to “settle down.” It didn’t take long, Miguel thought. He had known almost from the first that Alaine Winters must marry him.

Alaine’s twenty-second birthday fell on the last Sunday in April in 1943. Miguel had flown General Kirbee and his staff to a meeting with the Mexican Corps Area Commander in El Paso the preceding Wednesday, and he returned from Juarez with an extravagantly large bottle of L’Heure Bleu for her present.

They had cocktails at the Top o’ the Mark because Allie liked the view, and then dinner at the Blue Fox. It was a fine night, clear and brilliantly lit by a full moon, and after dinner they walked along the Marina, where the yachts lay gray and still in their warpaint and the dim-out surrendered to the moonlight.

There was a tender quality to their lovemaking that night, a warmth and gentleness that was new.

Miguel lay quite still, listening to the regular sound of Allies breathing beside him. In the far distance he could hear the foghorns blowing on the bridge caissons. The fog must be coming through the Gate now, he thought, and he could see it in his mind, thick and white in the moonlight.

He turned his head and saw that Allie was watching him.

“I thought you were asleep,” he said.

“No.” She brushed his cheek with the back of her hand.

“I love you, Allie,” he said.

A half-smile touched her lips. “Are you feeling that guilty?”

“Don’t joke,” he said. “It isn’t easy for me to tell you.”

“I know,” she said softly. “Oh, I know.”

“Happy birthday,” he said, and ran his hand up the long curve of her thigh, over her hip and the roundness of her belly.

“Mike—”

“Yes?”

“Thank you for everything.”

He smiled and asked, “For what, Allie?”

“For a wonderful day. For dinner. For the perfume. And for saying you love me.”

“Believe it, Allie. Believe it with all your heart.”

“I wonder.”

“It’s true.”

“Do you have any idea what you’re letting yourself in for?” she asked.

“I’m the one who should ask that,” he said.

“No,” she said. She sat up suddenly, crossing her legs so that her feet touched his side. Watching her, he felt a rebirth of desire.

She caught his searching hand and said, “No, listen to me. I’m serious.”

He grinned. “So am I.” But she looked so intent and determined that he lay back and lit a cigarette, liking what the flare of the lighter did for the deep gray of her eyes. “All right,” he said. “I’m listening.”

“I’m a one-man woman, Mike,” she said thoughtfully. “I know how trite that sounds. I have all the bourgeois virtues, believe it or not. I’m a House and Garden woman. I think that’s something you ought to know.” She took a cigarette of her own and lit it from his. He let his hand linger on hers until she moved it away. “I’m out of date, I guess. I should have been born a hundred years ago.”

“Is it all right for me to say I’m glad you weren’t?”

“Mike,” she said soberly. “What I’m trying to tell you, maybe, is that I’m in love with you.” She stopped, frowning.

Miguel lay quite still, waiting. Presently, he asked, “Well, Allie?”

“Tom told me about Aldyth Wylie. He thought maybe I should know.”

Miguel smoked in silence. It was as though some sharp object had suddenly pierced his vitals. “I was sixteen years old then,” he said slowly.

“Oh, Mike, please. I understand. And I know you loved her very much and this isn’t the same sort of thing at all because—because, well, you aren’t sixteen any more. I know all that.” She went on in a rush of words now, as though she had only just found the courage to say something that had been on her mind for a long while. “What I want you to understand about me is that I want—no, that isn’t right—I need to be wanted because I’m me. Not because I’m like someone you once cared very much for.” She pushed her cigarette into an ash tray and said unsteadily, “I’m saying this all wrong.”

When Miguel didn’t help her, she slipped down beside him and pressed her cheek against his shoulder. “Mike, if this is just an affair, tell me. Please. I won’t turn you away. Girls have loved soldiers like this before. But if an affair is all it is, don’t he to me. Don’t tell me you love me. Don’t make it—cheap.” Miguel felt numb. “I hadn’t thought about Aldyth for years until you brought her up,” he said slowly.

“Mike. Please don’t.”

“You think I’m lying?”

“I know you are.”

He kissed her, pulling her against him hard. “And is that a he, too?”

“God help me,” Alaine said unsteadily. “What have I gotten myself into?”

“Marry me, Allie,” he said desperately.

“Loving a man like you won’t be easy.”

“Did you hear what I said? I asked you to marry me.”

She began to laugh helplessly, holding herself tightly against him.

“What’s funny?”

“Oh, love,” she said clinging to him. “Please, Mike, yes.”

“I love you, Allie,” he said firmly now. “I love you and I want you to marry me.”

“And what will we tell our children, darling, when they ask where you proposed to me?” He could feel her shoulders shaking, though whether with tears or laughter he couldn’t be sure.

“We’ll tell them the truth,” he said, searching for her mouth with his lips. “The truth, Allie, Allie . .

They awoke in the dawn. Miguel could see the dark shape of his blouse draped over a chair, the metal insignia gleaming dully. He stretched and said, “Can we have some music? Softly—the neighbors won’t hear.”

She got out of bed and walked through the cool blue stillness. It was the Brahms Second Piano Concerto. She stood, bent over the machine, listening to the opening themes and then straightened and walked slowly, graceful in her nudity, back to the bed. He bunched the pillows against the headboard and made room for her beside him. He put his mouth against her hair and said, “I like your music, Allie.”

“We like a lot of the same things,” Alaine said.

“Yes,” Miguel said, “we do.”

Alaine sighed and closed her eyes, resting against him. “Do you have to fly tomorrow—today, I mean?”

Miguel shook his head.

“Good. Let’s sleep late.”

“Paradise for the soldier,” Miguel said.

Allie was silent for a time and then she said, “Mike—tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“Everything. Everything about yourself. All the things you’ve thought and dreamed about—”

“My God. Do you have plenty of time?”

“The rest of my life.”

“There isn’t much, Allie.”

“Will you really write a book, Mike?”

“After the war. I think so. I know the world is full of people who are always going to write books, but I’m really going to do it. It’s important to me. It’s the only thing I’ve ever seriously wanted to do.”

“Then you’ll do it.”

“I will. If you stand over me with a whip.”

She shook her head. “I couldn’t do that, darling.”

He rubbed his cheek against her thick blond hair. “It’s like silk, like flax in the sun. Like all the beautiful cliches in the world, Allie.” He laughed a little to himself. “We always complain about things being trite. But they’re trite because they’re so obviously so. I’ll have to remember that.”

“Talk to me,” she said drowsily. “Keep talking to me. I want to hear your voice.”

“I’m going to write a best seller and make a million dollars for us and we’ll get on a boat and travel around the world forever. We’ll keep going and never come back.”

Alaine brushed his shoulder with a lass. “How much do you weigh?”

He looked at her in amused perplexity and said, “A hundred and sixty. Why?”

She ran her hand over his chest and replied, “I like what you weigh. I like the way you look. I guess I like everything about you.”

“You’re sweeping me off my feet, you know.”

“You’re joking, but I am. I want to.”

They lay silently listening to the Brahms. Presently Alaine said, in a different tone, “Will you have to go overseas, Mike?” He could not keep the bitterness out of his voice as he replied, “I doubt it.”

“Because General Kirbee is a friend of your fathers?”

“Who told you that?”

“Billy.”

“God damn him. No, I don’t mean Billy and I don’t mean Kirbee.”

“I don’t care, Mike. I’m selfish enough to be glad if you don’t have to go.”

“Well, I’m not glad, Allie. The greatest war in history and I’m fighting it by being a bus driver for General Kirbee. I’ve got my father to thank for that.”

“Will you tell me about your family, Mike?” Alaine asked. “I really ought to know, shouldn’t I?”

“There isn’t much to tell. My mother was Spanish. My father was born in Mexico, but he’s mostly German. His father was Jewish. I should have told you that, maybe. You might have ideas about Jews.”

“I haven’t,” Alaine said.

“I don’t mean to be nasty about it, but I hear a great many of those smart cracks about kikes in the Army. People don’t know I’m part Jewish. The funny part of it is that I didn’t know it was a big thing until I went to Roslyn. They had a quota. The school had forty students, but there was still a quota. For people professing the Jewish faith, you understand. Not for people with one Jewish grandfather and enough money to pay full tuition. I never have figured where I stand—in the ghetto or out.”

Alaine touched the medallion Miguel wore on a chain around his neck. “Your family, though. You were Catholic at home?”

“Mother was. But she met Dad somehow and they ran off together. Her parents never forgave her. It was bad enough to run away with someone they considered a social inferior, but to have him be half a Jew as well—you just don’t do things like that in Spanish families. She had to give up her religion.”

Allie shivered. “It sounds medieval.”

“It is, in a way. But maybe giving up the Church wasn’t such a chore for Maria. She was a woman of considerable intelligence. It was never fashionable for women of her background. She was also a lady. You might say the combination was fatal. She was a one-man woman, too.” He fell silent. After some time, he asked, “Are you sure you want to hear this? It isn’t pretty, Allie.”

“I’d like to know, Mike. If you want to tell me.”

“I don’t really like to talk about it. What good can it do?”

“If you’d rather not—”

He reached for a cigarette pack and lit two. He handed one to Alaine. “Turn off the Brahms, then. It isn’t the right music for this.”

When she was back in bed, he said, “Mother was older than Raoul. About ten or eleven years older. It was one of those big loves, the land that leave nothing but raw edges when they’re over.” His voice was tinged with bitterness. “They left Mexico and came to San Francisco. Luis was born that first year. Times were tough, money was scarce, but they were happy enough. Then Essie came along. They were doing better financially by then and maybe some of the stardust was out of their eyes. Raoul’s, anyway. Then, after a long while, I came along. They were living in a big house on Rockridge Terrace in Berkeley then. You might say I was the result of a last try at getting along together. It didn’t work. Dad moved out of the house by the time I was five years old. He had a redheaded mistress.” He paused and then said, “Not long after that, Maria died. Essie couldn’t take it. She became a nun. That’s about it. I went to live with my father, spent a year at Encina, had to go home because he was sick—he’s been sick for a long while now—and in 19421 quit Stanford and enlisted. Period. That’s the story of my life to date.”

“And Luis?”

“In the Navy.” He inhaled deeply and blew smoke at the dawn-lit window. “I told you there wasn’t too much to it.”

“Who was Concha?”

“Tom must have told you about her.” He laughed softly. “He and Billy used to think there was something wrong with me because of Concha. She was my nurse, my nana. She was like a mother, only more so. I didn’t know Maria very well, really.”

“What happened to her? Concha, I mean?”

“My father sent her back to Mexico after Mother died and Essie went into the convent. I still get letters from her. On my birthday and my name day, and on Christmas and Easter. Devout Catholic, of course. Like all her people.”

“You must have been very lonely after she went away.”

“I was.”

“What made your sister decide, well—what do you suppose made her choose a life like that?”

So many things, he thought. And yet so few, really. With Maria gone, and Anson as well, where could she turn but to her faith?

Yet Essie must always have known that Anson would have stayed with her forever if she had only asked him. If, Miguel thought, that perfidious word. If Essie had had enough love in her to make that mawkish boy into a man. But Anson never reached a man’s estate, unless he achieved it in the single, immolative act of dying for an ideal.

“There was a fellow Essie used to go with,” Miguel said. “His name was Anson Wilbur.”

“The boy who went to Spain.”

“He was killed.”

“Oh, Mike.”

“I know what you’re thinking,” Miguel said, “but you may as well have it right. You probably have the cart before the horse. Essie didn’t go into the convent because Anson died. She had already been a nun for more than two years when he left the States.” He could sense her perplexity. “As soon as she took her first vows he left Berkeley. He was in a CCC camp for a while and after that he was just on the bum. He was all over. Chicago, the Middle West, in the South, too. Georgia and Alabama. He was beaten up by the Klan, pitched into a dozen or so jails, run out of towns—”

“How awful, Mike.”

“He was working as a union organizer—or agitator, if you will. Finally, he went to Spain. In 1936. I hadn’t seen him for years, but I missed him. The odd thing is that he always used to write to me. Post cards. I even received a couple from Spain.”

Alaine was still. Miguel lit another cigarette from the coal of the stub in his fingers and went on thoughtfully.

“The last time I actually saw him was the day of Christmas Eve in 1932. He was working for Maria then, doing odd jobs, mowing lawns, things like that. We were going to open our Christmas presents that night—we always did that. Instead of waiting until Christmas morning the way it’s done here. I guess we would have had Las Posadas and a piñata, too, if Concha and Maria had had their way. I remember Essie had just finished trimming the tree. It was a big one. Raoul always spent Christmas Eve with us and he liked a big tree.

“Anson was cutting the lawn and I was out on the step watching and talking to him. About four o’clock Raoul’s La Salle drove up. He’d never come that early on Christmas before. He went into the house to talk to Maria. I wanted to go in with him, but he told me to stay outside with Anson. About half an hour later he came out of the house, climbed into his car and drove away without saying good-by. I didn’t know what to make of it, Allie. Then Essie came out of the house and she was crying, almost hysterical. She began to scream at Anson. She said Dad had asked Maria for a divorce and somehow it was Anson’s fault. God was punishing her for the things she’d done with Anson. Going to Communist meetings and God knows what else. I know it had been bothering her, and she’d been to confession several times and probably the priest had frightened her pretty badly. Anyway, she told Anson she never wanted to see him again, that they’d committed mortal sins and now she was being punished. Raoul wanted a divorce from Maria.

“She was in a terrible state. I think maybe she had always thought Raoul and Maria would patch things up. And now, the way she saw it, it was her own sinfulness that wrote finis to the whole thing—what was left of a home.

“Concha came out and tried to help but there wasn’t anything anyone could say to Essie to make her calm down. Finally Concha told Anson he’d better go and leave Essie alone for a little while—until she got hold of herself.”

Miguel drew a deep breath into his lungs. Talking was bringing it back, with all its ghastly clarity.

“That,” he said presently, “was the last I saw of Anson Wilbur.”

“You mean he never came back? He never tried?”

“He tried all right. In spite of the fact that that afternoon must have shown him just how much of a religious fanatic Essie had become, he tried, Allie. But it was no good.” He paused again, because it was difficult for him to go on with it. But Alaine wanted to know. She really wanted to know. “You see,” he said, “Mother died that night, and after that who could tell Essie she was wrong?”

Allie waited. In the kitchenette, the refrigerator whirred softly, prosaically. He said, “And there were circumstances—the way Mother died must have done something terrible to Essie. Unabsolved. In mortal sin. Damned forever. Essie began her novitiate almost immediately after that. As far as I know she never saw Anson again either.”

He gave a short, hard laugh. “You remember I once said something about having tested the power of prayer. I did that night, Allie. Dear Christ, but I did. I prayed. I hoped for a miracle, a Demonstration, anything. I’d have prayed to the devil if I’d known how. But nothing helped. She was dead.”

“Mike,” Allie said gently. “I don’t see—”

“Oh, that. You mean did my mother die of a broken heart or something like that? Nothing so romantic, Allie. No, we had our

Christmas. She handed out the packages. I remember that she looked very pale and very beautiful—she was still a handsome woman even then. I had a book from Essie. Van Loon’s The Story of Mankind, I think it was. Odd how you can recall these little details. Raoul’s present was a portable typewriter. Mother handed out all the gifts and then she did a strange thing. This medallion I wear. It’s a Catholic thing—made in Italy, I think. Seventeenth century some time. It’s not valuable, and since neither Maria nor I were Catholics, it had no particular significance except as a keepsake. Well, she took it from around her neck and put it around mine. Essie started to cry and Concha took her out of the room. I told you, didn’t I, that my mother and I were not really as close as we might have been. I see now that she had only so much love to give, and it all went to Raoul. But just then, for a few moments there, we were mother and son and I didn’t care a bit that we were losing Raoul.” He drew a deep breath and looked up at the ceiling. It was growing lighter. Down in the little patio a bird chirped tentatively in the early morning quiet. “Then,” he said, “she went upstairs to the bathroom and drank a bottle of Lysol.”

He heard Alaine draw a sharp breath. He went on. “We heard her scream. The pain must have been horrible. She died that way, in convulsions on the bathroom floor. She was dead before the doctor came.”

Alaine whispered something, but he didn’t hear what it was. He was driven and consumed by the effort of telling her this

“It was dark. It could have been an accident. Raoul always said it was. And for a while I actually managed to believe it. I had to. But it wasn’t an accident. How could it possibly have been?”

He saw that Alaine was crying softly, but he could feel nothing but a growing emptiness in his chest.

“It’s nothing to cry about, really. It happened a long time ago. And somehow, a woman like my mother would almost cherish a violent death. I could never imagine her slipping away in her sleep, an old woman. No, bad as it was, it was the sort of thing I expected, deep inside.”

He lay quietly beside her waiting for the tide of release that should come now. It did not come. Instead, the old terror lurked just below the surface of his mind, mocking him. This should have been a moment of genuine intimacy. He had never before told anyone about the night Maria died. And yet, he felt unsatisfied.

He drew Alaine closer to him, filled with a weary compassion for her. I love her, he told himself. He repeated it to himself. I love her. The void remained.

If we have a child, he thought, if we marry and have a child it will be better. Thinking that, he fell asleep.

SEVEN

Wheels turning within wheels, Miguel thought, staring down at the finger-stained manuscript. What was the mechanism of escape? For Maria, a bottle of Lysol. For Essie, the nunnery. For Anson, Spain and death on the barricades.

And Nora? Well, perhaps Nora’s answer was a single-minded love for one man out of many.

He made a grimace of distaste and slipped the script back into the brief case, looking around him.

The tourists were awake and stirring, craning their necks for a view of the New England coast, low and green in the flat rays of the morning sun.

A woman in the forward part of the airliner’s cabin laughed and the faintly shrill note made him think of Becky. Dulled with fatigue as he was, he could almost imagine that it was Becky.

He found himself wondering why Luis, who could surely have had his pick of a great many women, had married Becky Coulter. Perhaps it had been simply because Becky had moved in close to the family. Propinquity could easily account for it in that case.

Miguel’s thoughts about his brother had run the gamut over the years. He had thought him at various times a distant god, a near-friend, a betrayer, a pitiable man. When Miguel thought of him now, he was saddened to think that they had never been able to exploit the bond between them. Basically, they were alike, but the twelve years’ difference in their ages raised a barrier. In the moments when they could have sustained one another, the really critical moments, communication had ceased. And in the end, Miguel had done his best to destroy the memory of that brotherhood that never quite was.

At least, Miguel thought thankfully, Luis never knew.

It was, oddly enough, Tom and Tom’s troubles that made a beginning. Miguel remembered that day in May 1940, midway through his freshman year at Stanford, when Tom called. Not from Los Angeles, where he was supposed to be boning for midterms at USC, but from the Palo Alto station.

It was one of those pleasantly bright spring days on the Peninsula, with the sky washed by a light evening rain and the air clear and cool with just a hint of the season in it.

From the window of the room Miguel shared with Julian Trowbridge on the third floor of Encina Hall, the foothills of the Coast Range looked green and fresh in the morning sun.

Julie was tending his aquarium of tropical fish and complaining about the pickled salamanders that kept turning up among the shoals of mollenisias and rashora trilineata he favored. Life at Encina could be trying for a person of Julian’s temperament.

“I’d like to catch the guy who thinks this is so funny,” Julie said, staring moodily at the murky tank. He was a tall Nebraskan with red hair that stood up like a frightened brush on his knobby head. His eyes were pale blue, and since moving into Encina with the rest of the frosh, they had held a hunted look. Julian was the sort of person who brought forth the best efforts of the practical jokers, and there was no shortage of jokers in the class of 1943.

Julian had been the first freshman waterbagged, the first to get caught painting the Big C in Berkeley red—a fact that accounted for his frightwig haircut and the bits of blue and yellow paint that still clung to his scalp, the first to have his bed pushed down the stairwell. The list was endless. There were people born to be abused and Julian Trowbridge belonged to this unhappy clan.

Miguel put his feet up on the battered desk and closed the copy of Buell’s Governments in Europe he had been reading. He stretched his toes in the scuffed brown-and-white buck saddle shoes and yawned. He lit a cigarette and tossed the pack to Julie, and said, “How much can a dead salamander eat?”

“Very funny.” Julian, standing in his striped pajama bottoms, which were too short, his bony feet bare and his even bonier chest exposed, looked like an angry heron.

“The world is blowing apart in our faces and everybody behaves like this was the sixth grade or something,” he said. “Salamanders, for heaven’s sake. You’d expect more maturity from a group of college men.”

Maturity, Miguel thought. Maturity, crap. That was all Raoul talked about these days. If Miguel wanted to go down to Del Monte with the rest of the gang for spring vacation, Raoul gave it the big thumbs down. Childish to want to run in a herd. Not mature. And when he asked permission to sign up for the CPT program, it was playing aviator. There had even been a hellish uproar because he had insisted on living at Encina instead of at home.

He thought of Raoul saying, “Ridiculous. Absolutely out of the question.”

And Becky, of course, meek and mild little Becky trying to act like God-knew-what, being the peacemaker.

“Your father’s not well, Mike. Why do you want to upset him with something like this?”

“Because for once, God damn it, just once, I’d like to be treated like something besides a stupid kid. What’s so wrong with wanting to spend my freshman year in the goddam dorm with the rest of my class?”

“Do I treat you like a kid, Mike?”

“Becky, for chrissake talk to him.”

“Mike, don’t swear so much. I will.”

And in the end, he had moved into Encina, but not before Raoul had made such a terrible scandal about it that Miguel hated to drive the seven miles to Los Altos to see him for fear it would all begin again. Of course, he had to do it and he did, but each visit was more unpleasant than the last with Raoul asking him acidly if he had gotten the silly kid stuff out of his system and was ready to come back and live at home where he belonged with his family.

Miguel wondered how on earth he was ever going to broach the subject of a fraternity to him. The SAEs and the DUs were both making a few moves in his direction—illegal, because rushing hadn’t started yet, but all the more flattering because of that. God, Raoul would throw a fit.

Miguel thought moodily of the RCAF. He had thought about it a great deal lately. The French and English were sitting safely in the Maginot Line, but the fall of Norway had shaken things up a bit. The Canadians were accepting Americans now. It might be a way out.

Julian began to dress for his eleven o’clock class. Miguel had the morning free and he was wondering what to do with himself. Perhaps he would drive out to Lagunita and study. There was a quiet spot at the northern end of the lagoon where no one was likely to bother you.

He heard someone down the hall yell his name. “Rinehart, tele-phone!”

He got to his feet and started out of the room. Julian, who was examining a hole in the heel of his socks, looked up. “Say, Mike. You going out tonight?”

Miguel shook his head. “I’ve got a Western Civ midterm next week. I think I’ll hit the books.”

“Well, can I borrow your Brooks jacket?”

Julian, dressed in Miguel’s clothes, looked even more like a bird than he did in pajama bottoms. He was not, and never would be, the proper picture of a Stanford Rough. He wasn’t put together right.

“The last time you wore it, you puked all over the sleeve,” Miguel said coldly.

“It was drinking those awful Pink Lady things Marjorie likes. I’ll be careful this time.”

“Okay,” Miguel said. “I’ve got a phone call, Julie.”

“Why don’t you come along? Marge’s roomie is free and she likes you.”

“Can’t tonight.”

Julian shrugged. “Let me know if you change your mind. We ought to get together more, Mike. Out of school, I mean. We’re roommates, after all.”

Miguel nodded absently and walked out into the hall. As he passed the stairwell he heard someone on the top floor yell, “Bombs awaaaaay!” And a waterbag plummeted down to explode with a great splash in the cavernous depths below. An agonized voice yelled back, “You son of a bitch!” Miguel thought dryly: Ah, maturity.

He picked up the dangling phone receiver and held it to his ear, half expecting to hear Becky’s voice asking him why he hadn’t come home last Saturday.

Instead, he heard Tom Eubanks say, “Spicko, you old greasy bastard!”

“Tom. For chrissake. Where in hell are you?”

“At the SP station in Paly. Come on down and pick me up.”

“What goes on? Don’t they have midterms at that football mill of yours?”

“Uncle Tom couldn’t be bothered right now.”

“Are you drunk?”

“I wish I were,” Tom said.

There was a middling long silence on the phone. Miguel could hear the sound of a train bell and the long sighing hiss of airbrakes.

“Are you in trouble, Tom?”

“It’s a long story.” Tom’s voice had lost its imitation gaiety.

“I’ll be there in ten minutes.” A thought struck Miguel. “You haven’t rolled out of school, you muscle-bound ape?”

“No. It isn’t that. The term papers you sent were fine.”

“I’ll be right there. Sit tight.”

“Hurry it up, Spicko. Your old Uncle Tom is lonesome.”

“Wait out in front,” Miguel said.

Back in his room he changed into a sweater and a clean pair of bedfords. Julie was holding a yellow-and-black regimental tie against the navy-blue Brooks jacket. “Can I borrow this, too, Mike?”

“That’s my Roslyn tie, for chrissake,” Miguel said.

“I don’t mind, Mike boy.”

“God damn it, Julie—”

“Mike, you really swear an awful lot,” Julian said, frowning. “You should watch your language.”

Miguel said impatiently, “All right, wear the tie. You can use my gray flannels, too, if you need them.”

“They’re too short for me, but thanks just the same.”

“I’ll have them lengthened. Remind me,” Miguel said and slammed the door behind him.

He drove down Palm Drive at fifty, watching the rear view mirror for the campus patrolman. He was worried about Tom. If it wasn’t school, it must be some girl. “Son of a bitch,” he said aloud. “God damn son of a bitch.” And if Becky and Julian didn’t like his language, they could jam it.

Tom was standing in front of the station. He was dressed in a suit, which made him look strange and older than he really was. The only luggage he carried with him was a leather toilet kit, the kind draftees carried. For a moment Miguel wondered if Tom had enlisted—to get his year over, the way so many undergraduates were doing. But no, that would be completely out of character for Tom.

He pulled up with a squeal of tires and opened the door. His car was a Chevrolet convertible, a 1938 model, and he hated it. He had always hated it and though he knew it was unreasonable to feel that way about what was, essentially, a pretty good car, he could not help himself. The car had never been what he wanted, even when it was new.

Tom jumped in beside him, banging his head on the chrome-plated arm of the convertible top as he did so. “Son of a bitch! These little cars, for chrissake! How I wish you still had the old Lincoln.”

They drove out of the station grounds across El Camino Real and onto the campus. “Well, give, dammit,” Miguel said.

Tom looked at his watch. “Hold up, Spicko. You have to buy me some lunch first. I’m hungry and broke.”

“Okay. We can go up to Rossotti’s for a sandwich and a beer. But talk, Uncle, talk.”

Tom laid his head back onto the worn leather seat back and closed his eyes.

Miguel watched him, concerned.

“Jesus, I’m tired,” Tom said. “You couldn’t sleep a wink on that milk train.”

It was obvious to Miguel that Tom would talk when he got ready.

“How long will you be up?” Miguel asked.

“Couple three days.” Tom looked worried and uncomfortable. “Going to see Ella and Oliver?”

Tom shook his head.

“What is all this, Tom?”

“I’ll tell you. Let me get my breath, that’s all.” He punched Miguel’s arm in a clumsy gesture of affection. “I’m glad to see you, you old bastard. And I want to thank you for those term papers you did for me. They were lifesavers.”

“I was afraid maybe they wouldn’t pay off. You use different texts down there.”

“Hell, the profs never look at the papers. And the instructors don’t care.” He grinned uncertainly. “How many papers have you written for me, anyway, Spicko? Counting Roslyn and all?”

“Quite a few, I guess,” Miguel said, grinning back.

They drove past Lagunita and around the golf course to Alpine Road.

“By God,” Tom said, “this is the way we used to get to jolly old Roslyn, isn’t it?”

“I remember, Uncle.”

“What happened to Olinder after the old alma went bust?”

“He’s working for some publishing house in New York. I hear from him once in a while. Now can we tie this down to what the hell you’re doing up here?”

“I came up to see you,” Tom said with sudden bleakness. “Trouble.”

Tom nodded, looking moodily at the car radio. He leaned forward and timed it to KRE. A girl on the radio was singing about “Those cool and lim-pid greeeen eyes—”

“A girl?”

“Well, in a way.”

“God damn,” Miguel said. “I knew it.”

“It’s not what you think. Nobody’s knocked up.”

“Then what—”

“A cold beer will loosen the tongue,” Tom said. “This isn’t easy, you know. In fact it’s just goddam embarrassing.”

“All right.” Miguel drove in silence past the rundown gate that once had led to Burroughs Hamner’s noble experiment in education, Roslyn School for Boys. “Want to go out tonight?” he asked. “Old Florian is around. And I think there’s a Juke Box Jig at the Fairmont.”

“Oh, balls, Spick.”

Miguel was shocked to see that Tom was almost crying. He turned and didn’t take his eyes off the road until they reached Rossotti’s.

With a bottle of beer and sandwiches under the trees, they settled down to lunch. A cool breeze blew down the narrow valley from the west. The first robins were appearing in the woods and orchards around the foothills. On such a day it was hard to think of the war in Europe and the great debate about neutrality and the futile way the British had tried to defend Norway.

“What’s the date today, Spick?” Tom asked quietly.

“The fourth of May. Why?”

He passed a hand across his eyes. “Christ, I forgot Ella and Ollie’s anniversary. It was day before yesterday.”

“Tom,” Miguel said. “Let’s get whatever it is off your chest. You’ll feel better and so will I.”

Tom nodded, looking at the ground. “You’re right as hell.” He drained the last of his beer and squeezed the can between his big hands. “You got any money?” he asked in a low voice. “Sure, some. You need it?”

“Aren’t you going to ask me what for?”

“No, why should I? If you want to tell me, you will.”

“How much?”

“About four bucks with me. Maybe another ten back in my room. And about a hundred and sixty in my checking account.”

“Anybody owe you?” Plainly, this was a difficult conversation for Tom.

“Julie owes me six. And Guth Guthrie hit me for three. Accounts receivable, nine bucks.”

“Jesus,” Tom said.

“Not enough?”

Tom shook his head.

“Then let’s figure a way to raise more. I take it you can’t go to your folks for it.”

“Listen. I’ve got to tell you.”

“All right.”

“Well, the plain fact is that your old Uncle Tom has gone out and gotten himself a dose of clap.”

“What?” The climax was so sudden and so unexpected that it was all Miguel could do to keep from laughing. But almost immediately he realized how degraded Tom must feel and it wasn’t funny at all.

“Well,” Tom said, red-faced, “you see why I can’t ask the folks. Ollie would skin me alive.”

Miguel nodded. Oliver Eubanks had certain standards and a young man “keeping himself clean” was one of them. You could rot your guts out with homemade gin—that was just good sport. But to copulate without a condom was un-American.

“I’ve scraped together two hundred bucks. I need three more for the treatments.”

“Five hundred,” Miguel gave a low whistle. “Somebody’s got you over a barrel. What kind of doctor did you see?”

“The only kind I could. If this got around down at school, can you imagine what would happen to my football scholarship?”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Miguel admitted.

“Hes legit,” Tom said. “He wants to use those new sulfas on me. They’ll knock it in two or three weeks. But it’ll take five hundred bucks.”

“We might get a loan on my car,” Miguel suggested. “Maybe we could get the whole amount.”

“We’re minors, remember? A loan company would pitch us out on our ears.”

“I suppose so,” Miguel agreed. “Besides, the damn crock is registered in my father’s name.”

“So that’s out.”

“Well, you take a hundred bucks from me. That’ll only leave two hundred more to dig up. We ought to be able to raise it.”

“Jesus, Mike, thanks. But what will you do for dough the rest of the quarter? How will you get along on sixty-odd dollars?”

“Study more,” Miguel said. “And drink less.” He took a battered pack of Chesterfields out and lit two. “Here, beat a weed and let’s use our heads. What about putting the bite on Alberg?” Billy was at the University of California and Miguel saw him seldom, but he felt certain that Billy would have the money.

“Christ, I don’t want to ask him,” Tom said.

“No, I guess it wouldn’t be such a hot idea.”

“He wouldn’t lend it, anyway. You know Alberg.”

Miguel nodded.

“So we’re right back where we started,” Tom said hopelessly. “Oh, that God damn miserable bitch. I could kill her.”

“Was she a pro?”

“Charity ass. One of the girls at school. Jesus God, to look at her—I mean, how’s a guy to know? Oh, Christ, I don’t want to talk about it. Is there anybody you can borrow from at the dorm?”

“I don’t think there’s two hundred bucks of loose money in the whole freshman class.”

Tom made an effort to recover his normal cockiness as he said, “Down at SC, we hear Stanford is the rich kids’ school.”

“You know, that’s funny. We hear the same thing about Southern Cal. How else could they afford those pretty uniforms for their band?” Miguel said, “Hold it, I know.”

“You know what?”

“Where we can get two hundred dollars.”

“Where, for chrissake?”

“Becky.”

“Becky?”

“Sure, Becky. She’ll lend it to me.”

“Oh, no, Spick. I couldn’t let you do that.”

“Why not?” Miguel plucked at a long blade of grass and put it between his teeth. “You let me worry about it, Uncle.”

“I don’t see it.”

“Like this,” Miguel said, smiling dryly at his friend. “I tell her the truth.” As Tom protested he raised his hand. “Almost, that is. I don’t mention you, though. I tell her it’s for me.”

And he had done that. He often wondered if he had really been acting for Tom or had he been satisfying a deeper, more personal need. Some desire to outrage his father, or a need to stun Becky. And was that the moment, he asked himself, that Becky, shocked and revolted to be sure, had looked at a boy and seen a man?

EIGHT

A pall of smog lay over Manhattan Island, a gray-blue haze compounded of industrial smoke, dust, and the exhaust fumes of a hundred thousand automobiles. It lay like a blanket over the city, a blanket pierced here and there by the taller buildings. Miguel could see the spires of the Chrysler Building and the Empire State, their eastern faces illuminated by the filtered light New Yorkers thought of as sunshine. From three thousand feet, the jumbled, congested mass of New York looked deceptively orderly. This is my country, Miguel thought, but he had no sense of having returned home. He had always imagined that he liked New York, but suddenly he realized that what he longed to see were the sere browns and summer greens of the Coast Range and the placid gray waters of San Francisco Bay.

The Constellation banked over the East River and the sun s reflection flashed on the glassy slab of the UN, raced over the dirty water flowing sluggishly under the Queensboro Bridge and vanished in the tangle of piers and wharves of the Long Island shore.

The cabin was filled with murmuring as the Frankfort tourists pressed their faces to the plexiglass windows for their first close look at the capital of the world. The cabin speaker came to life for the first time and the captain’s voice said he hoped they had all enjoyed the trip and would fly with the airline again. Miguel was reminded of the bus drivers’ spiels you heard on the sightseeing tours around San Francisco, Chinatown, Coit Tower, the Beach, Fisherman’s Wharf and then back to Union Square and we hope you had a real ball with us taking in the sights.

The stewardess was smiling cordially now as she untagged overcoats and returned them to their owners. Miguel thought of Lieutenant Artigue sipping his whisky in some Irish pub, and of J. C. probably getting ready to take his wife Denise to the evening cinema—the Royale near the Place d’ltalie where the American films were never shown.

He sat watching the ground come up to meet them as the airliner descended. The pattern of order seen from the air disintegrated as altitude diminished. He could see traffic, the tangle of streets and alleys, freeways, automobiles scarab-like from above. He watched people walking on buckled sidewalks, breakfasting on terraces. He saw the red brick faces of outlying tenements, the dirty glass fronts of neighborhood stores, children playing in empty, weed-choked lots. Everything was in motion. Even this early in the morning the ground below was swarming with the ant-hill pulse of life. He thought of the restless, moon-driven motion of the empty sea. In retrospect, it seemed peaceful and calmly beautiful.

The airplane leveled and glided toward the airport. Flaps sprouted from the wings. He felt the landing gear bump into place and lock. The approach light standards, white and orange, swept under the fuselage and then the white painted numerals on the concrete runway. There was a momentary sinking quiet and then the wheels squealed as they touched the ground.

The end of sanctuary.

The Customs inspection was short, but to Miguel, unbelievably tedious. When at last he was able to turn his luggage over to a skycap, he felt as though his eyes had been blasted with sand. He couldn’t remember when he had felt so tired.

He followed the porter out into the concourse, looking for Nora in the crowd. A flashbulb popped near the entryway and he turned toward the flash. He didn’t see her immediately, but he knew she must be there, in the center of a group of people. And then the crowd parted a bit and he caught sight of her, slim and lovely and unmistakably Nora.

She was wearing a plain gray suit and carrying a shoulder-strap bag with a brass regimental crest of some sort on it. Her hair was cropped off in a beautifully casual style that suited the high angularity of her face perfectly. She wore a pair of dark harlequin glasses—her one concession to motion picture custom. Other than that she might have been any one of a hundred smartly dressed women you’d meet walking on Fifth Avenue. Only if she were, you would stop and look after her, because there was that sudden, almost breathtaking impact that was strictly visceral.

He hurried across the concourse toward her, thinking that she was like a beacon in that crowd. Then she was running to meet him and he was catching her in his arms and it was as though he had never been away from her.

Her green eyes were more flecked with gold than he remembered and her body felt thinner, with a taut hardness that thrust against him demandingly. “Oh, God, Mike,” she said breathlessly. “I’ve missed you so much.”

“Nora,” he said, and kissed her again, trying to respond to her. Flashbulbs exploded. He became aware of the people watching them. Her, really. He wished with all his heart that they could be alone for this time of meeting. It was important. Perhaps the most important single moment in his life. But it was impossible, of course, and he remembered he had promised himself to try to understand what it meant to be loved by Nora Ames.

She became aware of his withdrawal. She could always read me like a book, Miguel thought. Always, from the first.

“Don’t be angry with me, darling,” she whispered to him. “I couldn’t come alone.”

“I know, Nora,” he said.

“Come on and meet them?” she asked. She had a capacity for self-demotion that was at once aggravating and endearing, he knew. Now she was apologizing to him for being who she was and what she was and he could not be so ungenerous as to refuse the gesture. It isn’t necessary, Nora, he thought wearily. It isn’t necessary at all.

The others closed in around them. A thickset man who must be Ziegler, a brush-haired young husky with an angelic baby’s face, and four men with cameras.

The thickset man smiled blankly. Miguel noticed that there seemed to be no real animation in his face at all. The features arranged themselves into the pattern of a smile, but there was no warmth. “I’m Victor Ziegler,” he said, extending a meaty hand. His flesh was cold and white to the touch, like the belly of a fish.

“And this is Tony Ayula, darling,” Nora said, leading Miguel over to the muscular young man in a charcoal gray suit and pink button-down shirt. “Tony is Artfilm’s New York public relations man.”

Ayula smiled at him as though they had just discovered they were fraternity brothers. “A pleasure, Mike. We hear good things about you.”

Miguel suppressed the urge to say “Like what?” and merely nodded.

More flashbulbs erupted as Miguel shook hands with Ayula. By this time, a considerable crowd had gathered, staring curiously. Miguel had the notion that this was exactly what Ayula had had in mind when he brought the photographers along. It wouldn’t be long before someone recognized Nora and then the mob scene would be on.

“Can we pull out of here?” Miguel asked. “I’d like to clean up a bit and get some coffee.”

“Poor darling,” Nora said. “Was it an awful trip? We were so worried about the weather. And then when you couldn’t get anything but a tourist flight—”

Miguel was about to correct “get” with “afford” but he thought better of it and simply said, “It wasn’t too bad.”

“Vic,” Nora said. “Are we all set? Can we go now, do you think?” Miguel decided that this was certainly something new, this business of Nora asking someone to make decisions for her. Still, she was Ziegler’s protégée now, and in Hollywood the word Producer was equated with God.

“Just hold it a while, Victor. Just a bit,” Ayula said, and turned to his photographers who were now regarding the crowd with professional apathy.

Ziegler looked at Miguel distantly and nodded. All he needs, Miguel thought, is the cigar and a five-carat diamond to look like those cartoons that used to appear in Der Stürmer. The gabardine suit, the long-collared silk shirt and the handpainted tie were unmistakably Hollywood. The face was florid, etched with deep lines around the mouth and eyes. And the nose was thick and curved. There might be no life in Ziegler, but there was no pretense, either. Miguel could like that. He couldn’t imagine Ziegler hiding his Jewishness under an Ivy League suit and a plastic surgery job on his nose as though it were something shameful.

“We’re staying at the Plaza, Mike,” Nora said. She squeezed his hand and added in a low voice, “All of us.”

He knew what she meant and something stirred inside him. Eight months without Nora was a long time.

Someone in the crowd murmured, “That’s Nora Ames.” Miguel drew a breath and walked over to Ayula. He took him aside.

“What’s on your mind, fellah?” Ayula said.

Miguel indicated the photographers. “Those your people or the newspapers’?”

“Ours,” Ayula said. “That way we can go over the stills and make sure we only release the best ones. We handle it this way whenever we can.”

“Well, that’s great. But I wouldn’t use any pictures with me in them.”

“You’re joking.”

“I’m not.”

“Why, fellah, we couldn’t tie this stuff up. The story is all laid out and set to go to the papers. What a girl like Nora does is news.”

“Use all you want of Nora. Just leave me out of it.”

Ayula smirked at him, his cherubic face radiating superiority. “Mike, boy, you can use the publicity too, you know. I happen to know what your last book sold.”

Miguel decided he disliked Tony Ayula very much. “Look, mister,” he said, “I don’t know if Nora ever bothered to tell you, but I have a wife and daughter out in San Francisco.” Ayula paled. He couldn’t have looked more shocked, Miguel thought, if I had suddenly urinated on his feet.

“We have been separated for some time,” he told Ayula. “But people at home don’t always play The Game Hollywood style. My wife might take a dim view of seeing my face plastered all over the newspaper.”

“Nora didn’t tell me,” Ayula said.

“No harm done. Just tell your boys to leave me out of the pictures. Tell them I’m a member of an African tribe and I’m afraid of having my soul caught by the camera.”

“Very funny.”

“It’s the best I can do. I’m tired.”

“But Mike—for chrissake. The whole story is set up to include you. That’s the tie-up. The gimmick.”

“Gimmick?”

“Sure. Artfilm’s buying you and it makes you worth more to them if we can capitalize on a romance angle.”

Miguel winced inwardly at Ayula’s thrust. It was as though an invisible shell between him and the rest of the real, pushing, swarming world had suddenly cracked. He became conscious of the clatter of machines, the echoing babble of voices, the hoarse shouting of the public address system, the roar of motors. The terminal was a madhouse of movement and crowding, shoving humanity. He heard Nora’s name repeated again and again as people pressed nearer. Someone shouted, “How about an autograph, Miss Ames?”

Ayula was still talking, but Miguel could scarcely hear him over the excited noises issuing from the moving mass of featureless faces surrounding them.

“What did you say?” he shouted.

Someone elbowed Miguel aside in his anxiety to get close to Nora. Miguel glanced over at her. She was surrounded by people, being jostled by them, touched by them, as she signed autographs. And all with a set, posed smile on her face that seemed to hit every person in that throng right in the solar plexus. He didn’t like to look at her.

“What did you say?” he shouted to Ayula again.

The childish face was flushed. “I said for chrissake why didn’t somebody tell me about the frigging wife and kiddie!”

Ziegler stepped suddenly between Miguel and Ayula. Miguel was stunned to see that he was looking at him with a sadly pitying expression on his coarse face. “Don’t do that, Mike,” he said in a barely audible voice.

Miguel looked down at his own hands and saw that they were knotted into fists. He realized with a shock that he had been within an ace of hitting Tony Ayula. It shook him badly.

Ayula, apparently, had not noticed. He was shouting at Ziegler, trying to make himself heard. Ziegler was shaking his head. For the first time he was showing some animation. Miguel strained to hear what they were saying.

“We can’t stand any bad publicity. Kill the story, Tony.”

“But Victor, for chrissake, we were all set to go.”

“Never mind that. Kill it. It isn’t that important.”

Ayula yelled, “Maybe we can figure some other angle on Rinehart.”

“Forget it. Why do you keep making me repeat myself?”

“I hate to waste the trip out here. I think—”

“Tony, you think and it costs money. We don’t want trouble.”

“Trouble, for chrissake, Victor! We come all the way out here—”

“Tony, you better start breaking this up. Now.”

Ziegler took Miguel by the arm and led him out of the crowd. Miguel held back. He said, “What about Nora?”

“Nora’s fine,” Ziegler said. “Having the time of her life. Tony will take care of her.”

Miguel looked back, but he could not see her. A lassitude swept over him. The crowd seemed to suck the life out of him. He let himself be led out to a black fishtail Cadillac limousine parked at the curb. The driver jumped out and opened the back door.

Miguel glanced back at the terminal. Policemen were moving in to break up the crowd and blue-white flashes were everywhere as Ayula’s cameramen took pictures. Miguel could imagine the story Ayula was improvising in his mind: NORA AMES IN NEAR RIOT AT IDLEWILD! Screen star Nora Ames was mobbed by excited fans at New York International Airport today. Usually blasé Gothamites overflowed restraining lines of police—He felt a little sick. Ayula had his mob scene. Miguel could not wipe out the image of Nora in that mindless press, that fixed, professional smile on her face. What was there about it that disturbed him so? It was as though she had suddenly turned into a smiling automaton, a robot keyed to stimulate erotic dreams in Technicolor. A fragment of a song parody of the forties floated crazily through his head. Tangerine, she’s my sex machine—Nora Ames, he thought. Nora Ames, my God. Was it all going to be like this?

Seated in the car, Ziegler said, “Tony should have checked up. That’s part of his job.”

Miguel fought the fatigue that seemed to be coming over him in waves. He understood Ziegler meant Ayula should have made it his business to know about Alaine and Dorrie.

“They say bad publicity is better than none, but it isn’t so. Bad publicity is bad publicity and no good for business. I’m glad you warned Tony.”

It occurred to Miguel that Ziegler had misinterpreted the object of his concern. Ever since making up his mind to return to America, he had been procrastinating about writing Allie, but he did not want her to learn of his return from the newspapers.

Ziegler looked out the window almost shyly and then said, “Forgive me if I meddle, but there is something—” He cleared his throat and added apologetically, “It affects your relationship with Artfilm. Otherwise I would not mention it.”

When Miguel said nothing, the older man went on. “Your wife—I was under the impression you were divorced.”

“No,” Miguel said. “Where did you get that idea?”

Ziegler shrugged. “I must have misinterpreted something Nora said.”

“We’ve been separated since 1952,” Miguel said. “But there has been no divorce.” He did not elaborate, nor did he give any hint of the revulsion that shook him when the word “divorce” was even mentioned. It would have to come to that eventually, he knew. But not yet.

“I don’t mean to be prying into your personal affairs,” Ziegler said. “But you and Nora—?”

“I guess you understand about that,” Miguel said shortly.

“You have known one another for a long time.”

“Off and on,” Miguel said. And without knowing quite why, he added, “Her first husband was my best friend.”

“You flew together in the war.”

“You could say that.”

Ziegler cleared his throat again. “Your wife, Mike—she is very troublesome?”

Miguel was taken aback. He had never thought of Allie as “troublesome.” There was a look of genuine concern on Ziegler’s face, as though the animation engendered by the excitement in the terminal was slowly dissipating itself into a kind of gentleness.

“Why in the world should you think that?” Miguel asked.

“I am sorry. Truly sorry. I should mind my own business. But I feel that we are going to be friends and I take liberties.”

“I’m flattered, Victor,” Miguel said with a touch of irony.

“Nora speaks of you often, as you might guess,” Ziegler said. “She says many good things about you. She is a great performer.”

Miguel wondered if the odd juxtaposition of phrases were deliberate. The man seemed devoid of malice.

Ziegler leaned forward and asked the driver to please go see if Miss Ames and Mr. Ayula could speed it up a bit. He moved back again and said to Miguel with a smile, “Nora is a trouper, Mike. You have to understand that.”

“I understand it, all right,” Miguel said.

“I hope you do, Mike.”

Miguel felt a twinge of tired annoyance. He could see no reason for Ziegler, who was, after all, a stranger, to explain Nora.

“I’ve known Nora a good long time, Victor,” he said. And who could know her better, he wondered? Certainly Tom had never understood the forces at work in her—

“While we’re waiting,” Ziegler said, “can we speak of the work? I want to get your point of view on this Green Hills thing.”

Miguel gazed blankly at him. “Green hills?”

“The Green Hills of Home,” Ziegler said. “Kathryn Bellamie’s new book. Artfilm has bought the property for Nora.”

“Can we start at the beginning?”

Ziegler shrugged. “The script you will be working on. You have read the book?”

“I haven’t read a Bellamie book since I was twelve years old,” Miguel said a trifle testily.

“It sold over half a million copies,” Ziegler murmured gently. Miguel understood that he was applying the only measure of success Hollywood understood, success itself. It should not have been unexpected. He had worked in Hollywood before. Nor, for that matter, was the book publishing business so different—successful books were pushed hard, unsuccessful ones were sold at remainder prices.

“Nora tells me you know Mrs. Bellamie.”

“I wouldn’t put it that way. She lived for a time in Palo Alto, and I went to school there. I met her once or twice, but it was a long time ago.”

“Anyway, you’ll be at home with Green Hills,” Ziegler said pleasantly.

Hardly at home, Miguel thought, depressed. He was disappointed in the material Ziegler and Artfilm had selected for him to make into a screenplay.

He remembered Kathryn Bellamie as a stout and prosperous woman who had discovered—in her own words—that she “had a knack for cooking up (and Miguel could think of no more apt expression) best sellers.”

It was significant, Miguel thought bleakly, that Bellamie and her quondam collaborator, a woman named Annalee de Wolfe, were known around Palo Alto as the Bobbsey Twins.

Annalee de Wolfe had died a rich woman in 1946, but Kathryn Bellamie, apparently, was destined to go on forever.

Miguel compared her string of best sellers, book club selections, and movie sales with his own rather meager literary successes and decided he was, as he had long suspected, out of touch with the popular market.

He said quietly, “I didn’t know you had a property in mind.” He felt, somehow, more depressed than ever.

“Artfilm paid three hundred thousand for the picture rights,” Ziegler said proudly. “Only I think it lacks something. I don’t like to say just yet. I don’t want to give you any preconceived notions of what I want.”

“Unless Kathryn Bellamie’s style has changed since the last time I read one of her books, I can tell you what it lacks. Gonads. If that’s what Artfilm wanted—” and he could not help but add—“and it must be, if the book was bought for Nora—I can’t imagine why a Bellamie book was selected. She doesn’t write that way and never has.”

“It’s very visual,” Ziegler said. “You’ll see that when you read it.

That was a slap on the wrist, Miguel thought wryly. Don’t criticize until you know. Only it wasn’t necessary to read the book to know about it. Kathryn Bellamie had been writing the same book for years. The costumes and the scenery changed, but it was always the same book.

Experience should have taught him that a discussion like this could get exactly nowhere. Story was a word that meant one thing in Hollywood and something else everywhere else in the world. The phrases, so familiar, whirled in his mind. Fresh approach. New ideas. Unique treatment. Creative advance. They all meant the same thing done in the same way by the same people. The motion picture industry was one of the most conservative, timid and downright reactionary groupings of economic power in history. It would be foolish to suggest that Bellamie repeated herself endlessly. Repetition was what Hollywood understood best.

“I suppose you’re right, Victor,” he said wearily. And he thought: Already I’m assuming the Culver City Crouch. Yes, sir. Yes, yes, yes. Someone always had to do the agreeing in these conversations. Generally, it was the writer. And somehow, the result was nearly always the same. Trite, artless repetition.

Ziegler took a cigar from an ostrich leather case. “While we wait, perhaps I could brief you on the story line.”

Would it be impolite to ask him not to? Miguel wondered. Yes. It probably would. Ziegler’s voice was dropping into a monotone. Apparently, his question had been rhetorical. He assumed, quite naturally, that Miguel would like having him tell the plot of Bellamie’s book.

Miguel swallowed some of the dryness in his throat and ran a hand across his cheek. He needed a shave. He needed some breakfast, too, and about eight hours sleep. But he wasn’t going to get eight hours’ sleep. There was Olinder to see. That wasn’t going to be pleasant.

Ziegler said: “This Spanish galleon is going down. Off the Irish coast, you see. There’s one survivor. We’re trying to get Montgomery Clift if we can, but he may have other commitments. Anyway, it will be somebody like him. This one survivor. Try to visualize it, Mike.”

Miguel nodded, trying to keep his eyes focused on Ziegler’s face. The tip of his nose moved up and down with a barely perceptible motion as he spoke. For the first time, Miguel could detect the faintest trace of a middle European accent. What was keeping Nora, damn it?

“Nora plays Corinne. Shes an Irish girl. The daughter of a lord. Sir Cedric Hardwicke type of person, very dignified. He’s seen the English smash the Armada and he’s angry because he hates the English, see? Then this survivor is washed ashore on his land. A Spanish nobleman. A sea captain, even though he’s quite young. He’s being washed ashore right where Nora is bathing in the sea. We thought we could shoot the ocean scenes at Carmel. It would be tremendous in wide screen and color—” Miguel fought to hold his eyes open by thinking of Nora bathing in the icy waters of Monterey Bay, with Elizabethan swimwear by Cole of California and Anamorphic Lenses by Bausch & Lomb. And his mind sought the past.

On March 8, 1945, General Kirbee went on leave, leaving Lieutenant Miguel Rinehart with ten days of time on his hands.

In that busy season of the war, ten days without assigned duties were a rare gift to any pilot of the Western Air Defense Command’s Flight Section. All winter Miguel had been flying staff officers from San Francisco to the east coast in weather that kept the commercial airlines on the ground. A hundred and fifty to two hundred monthly flying hours in Kirbee’s temperamental, stripped B-25 Mitchell had Miguel nervous and on edge and Alaine suggested that he take a day off, away from airplanes and flying.

“Stinson Beach is only thirty miles from here,” she said. “And hardly anyone has the gas to get there. It’ll do you good to spend a day sunning and fishing. You could take Tom with you.” Tom, who was attached to the Headquarters A-4 Section, had been assigned to the Hamilton, Tonopah, Paine Field and Moses Lake shuttle rim, carrying replacement parts from the Hamilton Sub Depot out to the training squadrons of the Command. He spent one night in three at home and the rest of the time he was out on the run.

“I don’t know about Tom,” Miguel said. ‘Til ask him. But what about you?” He was rather concerned about the way her early pregnancy was going. Major Race, the base surgeon, had said she must be very careful lest she lose the child.

“I can’t go, but that’s no reason for you to stay.”

The idea of a day by the sea appealed to him. “I could leave early and come back late,” he said thoughtfully.

“Any way you want to do it, Mike. You look beat, darling. You need a change.”

The subject came up again at Major Cavell’s party two days later, and Tom said, “If I’m here when you decide to go, just give me a blast.”

Nora came through the uniformed confusion in the room and said, “You two look like conspirators.” Miguel hadn’t seen much of Nora during the winter and he noticed that she had changed her way of fixing her hair. The pompadour was gone and with it most of the metallic brightness. It was smoother, more becoming now. And her clothes were different, too.

“The Spick’s got himself some free time. We want to take off and go fishing on the coast.”

Nora smiled at Miguel. “Sounds like fun.”

“For men only, baby,” Tom said.

Nora looked directly at Miguel and asked, “Won’t you invite me, Mike?”

“Sure, Nora.”

“I’m serious. I’d like to go.”

Pete Wallace and Major Cavell were sitting beside Pete’s wife at the piano and singing, “Parachute of nylon, wings of silvery hue, you’ll fly a bomber like your daddy used to do—” Everyone was a little drunk on rum and Coke and the room was a bedlam of noise. Miguel caught sight of Alaine across the room talking to Captain Brigandi, the engineering officer. She glanced over and smiled at him and he smiled back. Alaine wasn’t drinking much.

In a corner near the window an infantry officer was explaining the capture of the Remagen Bridge to Tina Cavell. He was quite unsteady and he would lean on the wall and stand on the balls of his feet each time Tina looked as though she might escape him.

“Tina needs rescuing,” Nora said.

‘Til go bring her back to this side of the Rhine,” Tom said. “Shes going to spoil those pretty legs associating with paddle-feet.”

Miguel watched Tom make his way through the living room toward Tina and the infantryman.

“Do you think she’s pretty?” Nora asked Miguel.

He grinned and said, “Pretty enough.”

“You don’t really.”

“Of course I do. Tina’s one of the best.”

Nora laughed. “Oh,” she said, “I was afraid she might be an old love of yours.”

“Afraid, Nora?”

She was looking at him challengingly. “I shouldn’t have said that, I suppose.”

He finished his drink and smiled vaguely. The liquor felt warm and pleasant in his stomach. “I won’t tell Uncle Tom,” he said. “Can I get you a drink?”

Cavell and the rest of the singers at the piano started in on, “I’ve got sixpence, jolly jolly sixpence—”

“I’d love a drink,” Nora said.

She followed him to the kitchen, where he mixed two rum Cokes. “This all right?”

Nora leaned back against the range and sipped. “Perfect.” She displayed no inclination whatever to rejoin the party in the living room.

Miguel could hear Pete Wallace telling one of the nurses from the Base Hospital, “Well, they told me at Roswell no one had ever slow-rolled a B-Two Dozen, so I talked it over with my crew and we decided to give it a go—”

Nora smiled and gestured with her glass. “You like this, Mike?”

“It’s a living, Nora,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s a living.”

“What about you? Is it better than what went before it?”

She looked into his face with sudden defiance. “Just what went before, Mike?”

“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded, Nora,” Miguel said. “I’m no tart, Mike,” Nora said in a flinty voice.

“I know you’re not, Nora,” Miguel said honestly. “We’re friends, aren’t we?”

“Yes?”

“Does that mean yes-we-are or yes-are-we?”

She shook her head and lifted her glass. “I don’t know,” she said. “I know what I want.”

Pete Wallace, having captured an audience, was shouting happily, “So there we were, flat on our backs at thirty thousand feet-”

Someone yelled, “Oh, no, not that one again!”

“Back off, for chrissake, I’m telling the lady a story!”

“Thirty thousand feet, hell. Pete gets a nosebleed on the second floor of the BOQ. We had to donate blood to get him through Primary!”

Miguel smiled at Nora and she smiled back. Their momentary friction now seemed to have brought them closer together.

“It’s not really so bad, is it?” he asked.

Nora shook her head. “For a start. No, it’s not so bad.”

“Tom’s happy,” Miguel said.

Nora regarded him strangely. “You really think so?”

“Yes. Isn’t he?”

“I thought you knew him so well.”

“I do,” Miguel said. And then he added thoughtfully, “Let’s say I’ve always thought I knew him.”

“Did you know he hates to fly?”

Miguel frowned, remembering that Billy Alberg had said something very like that.

Nora laughed mirthlessly. “He hides it from you. Did you know that? What’s so special about you?” She looked down into her glass, studying the ice cubes intently. “I know,” she said as if to herself, “I know what’s so special.”

“Are we going to fight again, Nora?” Miguel asked.

Nora shook her head violently. “Oh, Mike. I’m going to be somebody some day. I swear to God I am.”

“Don’t worry about it so, Nora.”

“Father Michael. You should have been a priest.”

Miguel smiled slightly. “You know, I think Uncle Tom would be surprised to hear it,” he said.

“The snowman,” Nora said. “The ice-and-snowman. Did you know that’s what I called you?”

“Priest. Snowman. What else, Mrs. E.?”

She shook her head again and looked down at the linoleum floor with a secretive, half-smile on her lips.

The song in the living room ended with a crashing chord and, “—no pence to send home to my wife, poor wife!” Pete Wallace was saying mournfully, “I was cut out to be a fighter pilot, but I’m six and a half feet tall. Oh, God, how I lust after a Mustang!” The radio was turned on and the rugs rolled back. Miguel leaned against the sink watching Nora. She wore a red dress with a plain, tight bodice and a deep V neckline. The shimmering cloth clung to her like a second skin. He felt numb and warm inside, but not really drunk. I should go out and see how Allie is getting along, he thought, not moving.

Nora glanced up at him. Red was a good color on her, he thought. It heightened the effect of those slanty gold-flecked Magyar’s eyes.

Music, slow and viscid, came into the kitchen. Nora put down her glass and raised her arms.

“Dance with me?”

She danced tight against him, with her forehead against his cheek. She was smaller than Alaine and more finely made. Her body was warm and sinuous. She sang softly. “ ‘You are always in my heart—’ That’s a fine song, isn’t it, Mike?”

He nodded, holding her dreamily against him, feeling the easy, slow rhythm of the music.

“They were playing it the night we first met,” she said. “At the Mark. Do you remember?”

He didn’t answer, thinking vaguely that she should have remembered that day because it was her wedding day, but instead she remembered it as the first time they met. He was touched and a little guilty and he felt a tremendous awareness of the woman in his arms. He stopped dancing abruptly and moved away from her.

Tom clattered into the kitchen with a braying call. “Hey, what’s going on in here with you two?” He laughed and punched Miguel lightly on the arm. “I’ve got eyes like a hawk, you flyboy.”

Tina Cavell and one of the nurses appeared in the doorway asking for refills. Alaine stood behind them, looking tired.

“Hi, Mike—isn’t it getting late?”

He didn’t want to leave, but he said yes, it was late.

“The evening’s a pup,” Tom said. “I want another rum and Coca Cola—” He sang the last four words doing a little dance step and kissing Nora on the back of the neck at the end of it.

“We have to go,” Miguel said.

“I’m sorry, Mike,” Alaine said. Nora said nothing and she didn’t look at him.

He heard Pete Wallace roar, “That goddam aydie-camp has all the women cornered in the kitchen again!”

“I’ll get my coat,” Alaine said.

Nora and Tom and Major and Tina Cavell walked out to the car with them. The night was cool and bright. From where they stood on a Sausalito hillside, they could see a last quarter moon riding over the dimmed-out lights on the bay.

“I meant what I said about that trip to the coast, Spicko,” Tom said. “Call me before you decide to take off.”

He was carrying a rum Coke and he spilled a little on his pink bedfords.

“You’d better get that,” Nora said. “It will stain.”

Major Cavell said, “Let me give you a hand.”

Tina’s voice was a little thick. “I’ve got some carbon whatcha-callit in the house. It’s in the kitchen cupboard over the refrigerator.”

Tom and the major went inside and Tina walked around the car to say good-by to Alaine. Nora glanced up at Miguel and he could see that secret half-smile on her lips again. “I meant what I said about the trip to the coast, too,” she said. “Good night.” He watched her walk swiftly back into the house.

“Mike?”

“What?”

“We’re ready to go,” Alaine said.

“Of course,” he said thoughtfully. “I’m sorry, Allie.”

Driving back across the Golden Gate Bridge, he considered • the party. Nothing ever really changed. In uniform or out, suburban parties were suburban parties. The same clever drunkenness, the sentimental songs, the mild flirtations. And looking down at Alaine, sleeping with her head on his shoulder, he felt suddenly depressed. What, in God’s name, had he been thinking of?

That tune kept running through his mind. Strange how you dated and catalogued things by the current popular times. “Where or When” and “Thanks for the Memory” and “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” and that marvelous Larry Clinton arrangement of “I Get Along without You Very Well” with Bea Wain on the vocal all reminded him of Allie Wylie and the Midwinter Assemblies. Any of those songs could still bring a stab of nostalgia. Now it was “You Are Always in My Heart” and Alaine, Billy, and Tom that night two years ago at the Mark. And Nora.

He only half realized that he was dodging the fact that Nora had taken the tune and made it exclusively her own.

On Thursday, after a day of restless pacing around the apartment, Miguel called Tom’s place. Nora took the message. He told her to tell Tom when he came in that Friday was the day and that he would pick him up early in the morning.

But when he arrived at their apartment on Friday, it was Nora who was waiting, just as Miguel knew it would be. He wondered if he had not subconsciously chosen a day on which it would be unlikely Tom would be home.

Nora had packed a lunch and a thermos of cold martinis and she was wearing shorts and a halter under her polo coat.

“Tom didn’t get back from Tonopah,” she said.

“No. I see he didn’t.”

She gave a short, rather self-conscious laugh. “You don’t mind, really, do you? I have to get out of this rabbit hutch or I’ll go stark, staring mad.”

Miguel thought of Alaine. He had left her sleeping. The right thing to do, the smart thing, would be to tell Nora he was sorry and go on back. He considered it only for a moment.

“Mike,” Nora said quietly. “Please?”

The great blank face of the apartment building seemed to press down on them. The morning was foggy and cold in the city, but there would be warm sun and a wind from the sea across the Golden Gate. He could see Nora shivering a bit in her light clothing as she stood with her bundles and that deliciously ridiculous thermos of liquor on the sidewalk. Her sandaled feet were small and delicate and somehow touchingly vulnerable on the thick gray concrete.

“You’re cold,” he said. “Get in the car.”

She did as she was told without saying a word. Miguel packed the lunch in the trunk and slid behind the wheel.

“You know this will have every swivel-tongued biddy in headquarters gasping for breath, don’t you?”

“I know,” Nora said in a small voice. “But do they have to find out?”

He put the car in gear and drove toward the 19th Avenue bridge approach. “I’ve lived half my life in a small town,” he said. “I understand about things like gossip.” But already, her question and his own reply had served a purpose. Now it was the two of them against the bluenoses and talkers. “How are you going to keep it quiet that Lieutenant Rinehart and Lieutenant Eubanks’ wife took off together for a day in marvelous Marin County? Someone will see us, or something will come up. It always does, Nora.”

Nora laughed with sudden gaiety. Her mood had changed swiftly and she seemed as excited as a child with a new toy. “Will it really go through the whole headquarters? Like an

“Through channels and by the numbers.” Some of her sudden good humor was infectious. It was a quality about Nora he had noted before. She made you want to share her moods.

“Then we’ll just have to be very discreet,” Nora said. “There is really no reason at all to tell—anyone. Is there?”

Now, Miguel thought. We’re conspirators now. And Tom and Alaine are on the outside. He had the feeling of having been neatly maneuvered. But no one was ever maneuvered like this against his will. Not really.

Nora put a lighted cigarette between his lips and sat, neither close to him nor far from him, her feet tucked in under her.

Miguel drove onto the bridge ramp and through the toll gate.

“I’ve never seen you out of uniform before,” Nora said. “I like you as a civilian.” He was wearing an old set of khakis without insignia and for the first time since 1942 he almost felt like a civilian again.

He took the Mill Valley turnoff and headed onto Highway One. The fog was thinning out.

“Look,” Nora said. “The sun. Can we put the top down?”

“Simple. This is the age of machines.” He pulled over and stopped the car. He unlatched the clamps, leaning over Nora to reach the righthand corner of the windshield. He could smell her perfume, a heavy, erotic scent.

“What’s that you’re wearing?” he asked.

“Something called My Sin.”

“Aphrodisiac,” he muttered, pushing the top off the windshield frame.

Nora laughed. “They all have such bedroomy names,” she said.

He pressed the button on the dashboard and the electric mechanism grumbled and worried the top into the well behind the seat. He put the car in gear again and moved out onto the empty highway.

Nora ran her hand over the soft leather of the seat. “This is a nice car,” she said. “I like Chryslers.”

“It’s Alaine’s,” Miguel said shortly.

“Oh,” Nora said. “You don’t use it much, do you?”

“No,” Miguel said.

She ran her fingers through her hair and looked out the rolled-up window on her side at the yellow-green fields passing by. “What time is it?”

“About nine.”

Nora drew a deep breath. “We’ve got the whole day,” she said with the air of a miser counting coins.

“Tom isn’t due in until tomorrow,” Miguel said watching the road.

“That doesn’t surprise you.”

“No, it doesn’t,” he said slowly. “It doesn’t at all.”

“We don’t need to have secrets from each other,” she said with disarming candor.

Miguel said nothing. He was thinking that this was a day that shouldn’t be happening at all, and yet it was happening and it seemed inevitable. He thought of the times he had seen Nora during the last year and a half and he knew that almost from the beginning he had wanted to be alone with her—for a day, for an hour. Tom’s wife. Tom’s wife. He emphasized the word deliberately, punishing himself with it. There was no remorse, only a vast willingness to temporize, to claim that nothing was wrong, that everything was exactly as it should be. He found himself remembering the time he and Tom had fought behind the store at Del Rio. If he felt anything at all right now it was only that same desperate defiance.

There was, he realized, a vast difference between candor and honesty. This day was candid. He and Nora hid nothing, would hide nothing of themselves from one another. That was implicit in their being here, alone, this minute. But was it honest? Would Alaine think it honest? Or Tom?

Nora had opened her polo coat to bare her legs to the sun. The skin of her thighs was pale and smooth with a tracery of fine veins and a halo of golden down.

She saw him watching her and her lips parted slightly as though she would speak. But she said nothing, and only ran the tip of her tongue lightly over her lips, making them glisten in the morning light. Miguel could feel the change that was taking place as their entire relationship shifted. It was a fatally fascinating thing to experience. He felt like a climber watching his rope part, strand by strand.

It should have been enough to make him tum back, but he drove on, guiding the car around the increasingly sharp curves with a concentrated effort. It took that kind of effort to keep his eyes from Nora.

They left the Chrysler on a high bluff by the ocean and walked down a steep trail cut through the tundra to the beach. The sun in the east cast their shadows ahead of them, long and sinuous on the smooth, unmarked sand. As far as the eye could see in either direction, the beach lay empty.

“What will we do, Mike?” Nora asked. “Swim or fish?”

“It’s probably too cold to swim. Ill heave a line into the surf and see what happens. People have landed twenty-pound stripers on this beach.”

Nora shivered. “What an awful thought.”

Miguel smiled at her and said, “You wanted to come.’’

“Yes, I wanted to come.”

He shifted the picnic basket to the side away from Nora and thrust the surf rod through the straps.

“Is that a book in your pocket?” Nora asked.

“The Oxford Book of English Verse.”

“You’re joking.”

“No, indeed. When I lie in the sun I like to read poetry.”

“I wouldn’t have thought it.”

“If you mention it to anyone in the Section I’ll deny it. But I’ve a taste for verse. I like it.”

Nora looked at him curiously.

“An acquired taste, I’ll admit,” Miguel said. “When Tom and I were at Roslyn, there was a teacher—”

“Karl Olinder.”

“Tom told you about him.”

“Tom also told me you used to do most of his homework for him, too.” Nora laughed scornfully, swinging her arms as she walked through the sand. “Isn’t that just like Tom.”

“It wasn’t quite like that.”

“No, of course you’d say that.”

The sea was a brilliant cobalt color in the morning sunlight. High overhead, a flight of four Kingcobras wheeled and slanted out toward the Farallones on their morning patrol. Miguel squinted at them, automatically reading their markings.

“From the training squadron at Santa Rosa,” he said.

They reached the high water mark and Miguel studied the deserted beach curving back to the north. “Let’s head up that way. There’s a cove just past that headland. I’ve seen it from the air.

Nora walked beside him in silence, the sea wind blowing at her open polo coat and tangling her hair. Hair the color of rose gold now, Miguel thought, soft and warm-looking and no longer dyed brassy bright. Nora was learning.

“How long have you been Tom’s personal god, Mike?” Nora asked suddenly. “And doesn’t it get tiring being an idol?”

“For chrissake, Nora,” Miguel said, with quick annoyance.

“I m truly curious. How long?” She laughed. “You notice I’m not asking why. I told you the other night I already knew why. I’d just like to know when it began with you and Tom. And how important it is. To you.”

“I think you’ve got something wrong, Nora.”

She smiled at him knowingly. “You don’t want the responsibility, do you, Mike—only you don’t know what to do about it. Tom’s such a weakling, really. I don’t think I blame you.”

“If you think that,” Miguel said harshly, “why did you marry him?”

Nora said, “He wanted me to.” Then she shrugged and asked, “Why did you marry Alaine? She’s wrong for you, you know.”

“I married her because I loved her.”

“Past tense, I notice. And so soon.”

“You mistook my meaning.”

“I don’t think so, Mike. Past or present, it doesn’t matter. You married her because you were in love with someone else. You aren’t the first man to have made that sort of double mistake. You won’t be the last, either.”

“Tom talks a great deal, I see,” Miguel said, suddenly angry.

“Tom didn’t tell me anything. He didn’t have to. Oh, I’ve watched you. Certain songs, certain places. Did she die? Did she get fat or marry someone else or move away?”

The realization that he could not defend his memories without diminishing Alaine was galling.

“How does all this concern you, Nora?” he asked coldly.

Stung by his tone, she turned her face away quickly. She said tentatively, “I’m sorry. I honestly am.” She looked up at him and took his arm and laid her head against his shoulder. “It’s just that I’ve made a study of you.”

“It isn’t worth the effort,” he said.

“I think it is.”

He said nothing and they walked in silence.

“Mike?”

“Yes?”

“Please.”

He sighed heavily, knowing he could deny her nothing just now. “All right, Nora. It’s all right.”

They found the cove and a sunny declivity in the bluffs behind the headland. Miguel dropped the basket near the rocks and took off his shirt and rolled up his khakis and took the fishing gear down to the water. He baited a hook with a strip of pork and cast the line into the surf, setting the long bamboo pole into a holder. Then he walked back to where Nora sat in her shorts and halter watching him.

“Hell of a sportsman, I,” he said. “Set lines and bait.”

“You’re not still angry? I should learn to stop talking so much. I will, I promise.”

“All forgotten, Nora. Let’s relax and enjoy the sun.”

She spread her coat on the sand and lay face down on it, untying the strap of her halter. Miguel found himself a place nearby, lit a cigarette and took out his book.

The sun rose higher, burning down on the beach and the sea. It seemed to Miguel that they were a million miles from the beat of airplane engines and the hot sweaty smell of cockpits and the bitter tang of aviation fuel. It seemed too that they were as far from Alaine, asleep in the dingy, fog-shrouded apartment and from Tom, far off across the mountains to the east.

“What’s that over there, Mike?”

“The Point Reyes light.”

“And those way off in the sea are the Farallones? I’ve never seen them so clearly.”

Miguel sat watching her over the edge of his book. Her body was slim, almost thin, but her breasts were full and her hips rounded. Her hair brushed her shoulders, shimmering in the brilliant sunlight.

She caught him watching her and smiled at him. “Read something to me.”

“All right. What shall it be?”

“I don’t know anything about poetry. They didn’t specialize in it where I went to school.”

Miguel leafed through the book. “This is Matthew Arnold,” he said. “ ‘It irk’d him to be here, he could not rest. He loved each simple joy the country yields, He loved his mates; but yet he could not keep, For that a shadow lower’d on the fields, Here with the shepherds and the silly sheep—’ ”

He stopped abruptly, closed the book and put it aside. “I think that’s about enough of that,” he said.

Nora laughed at him, pressing her cheek against the lining of her coat. “Oh, Mike, you’re wonderful. You had such a look on your face.”

“Did I?” He leaned back against the rocks and closed his eyes. The slow, tide-driven sound of the sea filled his ears and the sun felt bright and hot on his skin.

“Is it too early to have a martini, Mike?”

“It’s never too early when you feel this way,” he said. Then he laughed. “Martinis and My Sin at eleven in the morning.” Nora sat up suddenly, holding her halter. “Is there something wrong with my perfume, Mike? I thought you liked it.”

Miguel was embarrassed and he cursed himself for an idiot. “There’s nothing wrong with it, Nora. Nothing.”

“Only it isn’t generally worn in the morning—is that it?”

Miguel was unaccountably touched by her sudden vulnerability. She looked as solemn and anxious as a child.

“It’s perfect, Nora,” he said.

She looked down at the sand with a strange expression. “I have a lot to learn, haven’t I?” she said.

Miguel sat down beside her and said, “Nora—”

“No,” she said. “I want to know these things. Promise me you’ll always tell me. Everything. About my clothes, the way I speak. Promise me, Mike.”

“Nora, I don’t think—”

“Promise.”

“All right. If you want it.”

She leaned against him and the texture of her sun-warmed skin against his was like an electric shock. He pulled away instinctively.

She threw her head back and laughed at him. The gamine was gone and the old Nora took her place. “The snowman. The ice-and-snowman,” she said.

“You know better than that.”

She held the thin cloth of the halter to her and squeezed herself delightedly. “Let’s have a martini,” she said.

He poured two drinks into the little plastic cups. “Salud,” he said. “Salud y pesetas.”

“Y tiempo para gozarlas,” she finished the toast.

Man-pleaser, he thought. “Where did you learn that?”

“I’ve watched you drink before. I’m very observant.” She finished her martini watching him over the rim of the cup. “Más,” she said, holding out the cup. “Más, por favor.”

“A regular paisana, aren’t you?”

“Te quiero.”

“What did you say? That isn’t the way to ask for more to drink.”

“I know what I said.”

“Be careful, Nora. A man’s control is pretty marginal under conditions like these,” he said a trifle unsteadily.

“Te quiero, te amo, te adoro—I’ve been studying, you see.”

He dropped his cup and kissed her, hard, feeling her fingernails biting into the flesh of his back.

She broke away and stood up, breathing through parted lips. Her eyes were bright and drowned in triumph.

“Nora—”

‘Tm going swimming,” she said. “This sun is too wonderful to waste.”

“You’ll freeze,” he said. His voice sounded strained and unnatural and he knew she must be laughing at him, really laughing at him now.

“Then stand by to fish me out,” she said, and turned and ran down to the water. He watched her go. She moved with the grace of a yearling filly, sleek and glistening. When she reached the water’s edge, a hundred yards away, she turned and waved to him. He waved back. She stripped off the halter and slid out of the shorts with a twisting, gliding motion. Miguel could see the contrast of tanned and untanned skin, the flatness of her belly, the tipped curve of her breast. She splashed out into the water and he retrieved his cup and poured himself another martini and drank it slowly, not taking his eyes from her.

At waist depth, she met a slow swell and dove into the sea, swimming straight out from the shore. She had a strong stroke. The water frothed at her feet.

Miguel stood up, not wanting to lose sight of her in the ground swell. She waved again and he heard her call to him. His limbs felt heavy as he walked through the sand.

He stood where she had dropped her clothes. A pool of silk and linen on the hard, wet sand.

Nora’s head was a speck on the great face of the sea. She turned and started back. The waves washing onto Miguel’s bare feet were icy.

She was close inshore now, standing in shoulder-depth water, swaying with the waves, her hair tangled and awry. He moved forward, impelled by an urge that would surely smash him if he resisted.

She came to him, rising out of the white water, her icy nakedness gleaming in the sunlight.

When he touched her at last, she said, “It had to be like this. You’ll never get away from me.”

They watched the sunset that day, lying together wrapped in her coat with a driftwood fire burning nearby, the green and blue dancing in the flames.

It had seemed the most natural thing in the world for them to be together so. Alone and together they could create a moment in which nothing else existed. But only while they were alone.

After that came the deceits, the petty lies, the accounting for minutes and hours away from places where they should ordinarily have been. And all the while the strain of seeing Tom and Alaine go on living as though nothing had changed. But everything had changed. He was trapped, possessed by a thousand remorses, goaded by a thousand jealousies.

So often in the years that followed Miguel had waited, hoping, for that release that was said to come with time. Nora had said, “You’ll never get away from me.”

And he hadn’t—not to this day, this hour.

NINE

“Well,” Victor Ziegler said, “what do you think of it, Mike?” It took Miguel a moment to realize that Ziegler was still talking about The Green Hills of Home. It was hard to concentrate when you were as tired as this. You could be drunk with fatigue. A double jigger of Old Fatigue, please. And a chaser of loquacity on the side. God, he wished Ziegler would shut up.

“What about it, Mike?”

“It sounds like it will make a picture,” Miguel said neutrally. Ziegler sounded a little disappointed at Miguel’s lack of enthusiasm. “Well, perhaps we can talk contract now. I’m a little surprised you didn’t know we were doing Green Hills. I was under the impression Nora explained everything in her cable. She insisted on being the one to let you know.”

“No, the only thing she said was that you were offering me a chance to do one of her scripts.”

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter too much, does it? It’s simply a piece of writing to do. We might just as well finalize your position with us as soon as possible, don’t you think?” When he spoke of contracts and “finalizing” (everything was “finalized” at one time or another in Hollywood; it had nothing whatever to do with something reaching its ultimate form) a film seemed to fall over Ziegler’s eyes.

“Don’t misunderstand me, Victor,” Miguel said. “Any objections I have to Bellamie’s garbage won’t stand in the way of us making a satisfactory arrangement.”

“Have you other commitments?”

The sight of Nora and Tony Ayula coming out of the terminal, still surrounded by people, saved Miguel from having to make an immediate answer. Nora waved to the crowd and walked toward the car with that loose-limbed, graceful, athlete’s walk of hers. The driver brought up the rear carrying Miguel’s bag and brief case.

Ayula held the door for Nora, and then, since there was no room in back, climbed in front with the driver.

Nora sat down next to Miguel. Her face was flushed and excited. “Darling,” she said. “I’m sorry. It couldn’t be helped.”

“He understands,” Ziegler said, leaning forward to give the driver instructions. “We can drop Tony off, then to the Plaza.”

The car started and they drove past the lines of hangars, each marked with the name of an airline.

“Tony?”

Ayula half turned and looked into the back. There was a pleased smile on his pink face. The trip to Idlewild had not been wasted after all.

“Have Henderson get the contracts ready for Mike’s signature this afternoon. We’ll be down after lunch to take care of it,” Ziegler said.

“Not this afternoon, I’m afraid,” Miguel said. “I have to see someone at Hillyer Press.”

“Mike,” Nora cried. “Today?”

“I’m afraid so. I have a lunch date with Karl.”

“Lunch, too,” Nora said.

“Well, in that case,” Ziegler said, “Tony can bring the contracts over to the hotel first thing in the morning.”

“There’s no question in your mind, is there, Mike?” Nora sounded a trifle aggrieved.

“It’s not that. I simply have to see what arrangement Hillyer Press wants to make on the new book.”

“The Hillyer people haven’t got you tied up, have they?” Tony Ayula said aggressively.

Miguel fought to control his irritation. “They have an option on this book and my next. It’s customary, you know.”

“Oh, I was thinking about the rest of it. You can do any outside writing you want, of course, and they have no claim on it.”

“Whatever outside writing I can find the time for,” Miguel said.

Ayula laughed. “If that’s all it is—”

“Why all this fuss about the book, Mike?” Nora asked.

“I simply want to see Karl about it and find out what he wants me to do, Nora,” Miguel said. “Hillyer gave me an advance and I have a responsibility to them on that score, at least.”

“Jesus,” Ayula said jokingly. “This is the first writer I’ve ever met with a sense of responsibility.”

Miguel decided to ignore Ayula and he addressed his words to Ziegler. “My relations with Hillyer haven’t always been the best possible,” he said. “I suppose no writer has ever gotten along perfectly with his publisher. There’s always something upsetting the balance—though you would imagine they both wanted more or less the same things. However, I personally owe a great deal to one of their people—the senior editor there. That’s why I have to see him—even before I check with Magnussen.”

“Does it have to be today, though?” Nora asked. She was feeling rather put upon, Miguel knew.

“I’m sorry, Nora,” he said.

“You couldn’t postpone it?”

“Not very well. Since I have to give him some bad news.”

“Mike!” Nora sounded really angry now. “You mean you didn’t finish it.”

He had to remind himself that she had every right to be angry. He had spoiled most of last summer for her by refusing to leave the shabby beach house he had rented in Malibu and move into her new place in Canoga Park. And for all that, she had tried very hard to get him working, writing again. The trip abroad had been a last resort. Still, he was too tired now to be tolerant and understanding.

“No,” he said shortly. “I didn’t finish it. I couldn’t.”

“Then all these months we spent apart were a waste of time.”

“You could call it that, I’m afraid.”

Ziegler interrupted their exchange with a cough. He crushed his cigar in the ash tray and said, “We fly back to the coast tomorrow night. Will that give you all the time you need in New York?”

The approach to New York, Miguel thought distastefully, was really incredibly ugly. He remembered the almost breathtaking sight you got of San Francisco approaching from Marin and the Golden Gate Bridge: the city itself, all stark white and shades of gray, with the piers thrusting like fingers into the cobalt waters of the bay. And the brilliant orange spans of the Bay Bridge pulsing in great graceful arcs to Yerba Buena Island and then descending in a gentle, yet immensely sturdy, cantilever section to the flat tidelands of the Oakland side. The memory was painfully nostalgic. It made him think of Maria, the vaguely remembered Maria of long ago, before the bums on her lips and the awful death on the white, hexagonal tiles of an upstairs bathroom. It made him think of a verse Maria used to read to him. Here he lies where he longed to be, home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill—What golden lands must she have been remembering as she read that verse? The purple dusk of the Sierra Morena, and the rolling forest lands of Sinaloa with their edges laved by the semitropical sea? How continuity was lost, he thought. He was cut off from the golden lands, from the dark and stem-faced Don Miguel Castana of the forgotten portrait, from the sunlight shimmering on the white-capped chop of waves in the Golden Gate—What am I, who am I, he wondered. A nothing, as Tom used to sing. You’re nothing but a nothing—with syncopation by Patty, LaVerne and Maxine at the University Creamery, Palo Alto, California, circa 1938. What are you and where do you belong? Listen to the song. A nothing, a nowhere …

“Mike,” Nora said with annoyance in her voice. “Victor asked you a question.”

“There’s nothing to hold me in New York,” he said. Or anywhere else. He remembered that in his days at Stanford he had developed a surpassing admiration for Thomas Wolfe. But with the snide and sophomoric destructiveness of youth he used to ask derisively, “What in hell is a great, lost beast? This Eugene Gant is always thrashing about like a great lost beast.” Now, after fifteen years, all he had to do was look in a mirror to see one. No, not quite, he told himself. Beast for sure and lost for goddam sure. But not great. It was given in this world to few people to be great beasts. He was only a small one. Minuscule. A little lost sheep who has gone astray, with tearful homesick harmonies by Aviation Cadets of Class 43-B of Luke Field Advanced Flying School, USAAF, circa 1942. Christmas, 1942—to make the sentimentality more poignant, the nostalgia more lachrymose. And he had joined in, like the faker he was, and yearned to be home at Christmas to deck the halls with boughs of holly and Lysol stains So he hadn’t belonged there, either, except for that one instant between participation and self-discovery. The time it took a thought to travel from one part of the brain to another. A microsecond in eternity. That was exactly how long he had spent at home. And now, if he worked very hard, there would be that ranch in the valley or maybe a place in Canoga Park with a Jaguar and a station wagon in the garage and an underwater light in the swimming pool.

Nora could make the difference, he told himself. Couldn’t she? God, couldn’t she? He could feel her hurt and anger right now. It was like an aura. No, more tangible than that. Like the horns on a mine. She had a perfect right to be hurt, but was it always going to be like this? He wished he could have her away from these others—alone, he could explain and she would listen. It had always been that way. Alone together they had usually been able to do anything, be anyone. It was only when others invaded their private world that they quarreled. That, as much as his inability to work, had been the reason for his decision to go abroad. He wished he could explain this to her. He wished he could tell her how it had been with the constant stream of movie people racketing around the tiny beach house, having a long party. It would help if he could say all this to her but he felt sure that she couldn’t and wouldn’t understand it now. His resentment focused on Ayula and Ziegler and he felt sullen and cloddish.

An uneasy silence had fallen among them and they rode for a time without saying a word.

Presently, Nora turned to Miguel. “I’ve often wondered why you have tied yourself so firmly to Karl Olinder,” she said coolly.

So the lunch date was still rankling. “He’s one third of my Holy Trinity,” he said. “Magnussen, my rather sluggish agent, Hillyer Press, my munificent benefactors, and Karl Olinder, my Socrates, the Schumann to my Brahms.”

“I’m serious, Mike.”

“I know you are. I don’t feel like being.”

She bit her lip and fell silent.

At Broadway, the driver stopped the car and Tony Ayula climbed out.

“I’ll bring the papers to the hotel this evening, Victor,” he said. “See you then.” He walked jauntily away, disappearing in the crowd of early morning shoppers.

“I really hate being a bitch,” Nora said suddenly. “Today of all days.”

Miguel took her hand and held it. The desire to close his eyes was almost unbearable, but he knew that if he tried to sleep when he reached the hotel, he would begin thinking about his meeting with Karl and he would get no rest at all.

Nora seemed to read his thoughts. “Must you see Karl when you’re so tired?” she asked.

“Look, Nora,” he said. “I’m not looking forward to it. I’m not doing it to pass the time of day talking over old times. Hillyer financed my trip with their advance. I can’t just tell Olinder to sit on his hands until I’m ready for him. Even if you choose to disregard what a complete bastard it would make me—think of the position it would put him in with the check signers. It was Karl who got me enough to make the trip possible.”

“You could give back the money.”

He did not feel like explaining that he did not have the money to give back. He was afraid she might offer to lend it to him, or even suggest that he ask Alaine.

“No,” he said shortly. “I can’t.”

Nora said, “Then I suppose the only thing to do is to finish the damned book as soon as we get home. Victor wants a shooting script on Hills by the end of the year.”

Miguel sighed. Nora had, he noticed, picked up that irritating Hollywood habit of shortening titles when speaking of a “property.”

The second floor of the Hillyer Building was as plush and modem as free-form furniture, wall-to-wall carpeting and sliding glass panels could make it. It commanded a low angle view of Madison Avenue interrupted only by the corner posts of the building and a planetary system of genuine Calder mobiles suspended from the high, acoustic tile ceiling.

This was the home of Hillyer’s money-maker, Hillyer’s Monthly—an upper-middlebrow periodical devoted to fashions, stories by the more fashionable authors, and advertising. Karl Olinder variously referred to it as a little magazine for the millions and the Bible of suburban intellectualism. There were elements of an appeal to both in it. Its editorial policy was devoted to something called “dynamic conservative liberalism” and was , ambiguous enough to appeal to almost everyone. Its contributors included CIO men and members of the China Lobby, the United Nations and the Silver Bloc. Adlai Stevenson was as welcome as Senator McCarran between its covers. Miguel could never read the magazine without having the uncomfortable sensation of having stumbled into a schizophrenic’s analysis.

The third floor of the building, where Olinder’s office was located, was the base of the Hillyer Press. Here on the third deck were bare floors, walls in need of paint, and golden oak office furnishings. There was always the faint odor of printer’s ink here, and piles of galley proofs, new bindings, packaged book jackets, and stray yellow sheets on the floor. The typewriters were old Underwoods and not the electric, silently cybernetic IBMs found below. Nor did the secretaries resemble the Charm and Vogue models of the magazine staff. Instead, they looked efficient and purposeful.

He walked through the labyrinth of halls and offices into the nook Karl claimed for his own. He had a new secretary, a severe young woman with dark hair and heavy rimmed harlequin glasses. She was banging hard on an obsolete typewriter and she did not look up when he knocked on the open door.

“Come in and sit down. Karl will be right back.”

Miguel did as he was told. He laid his brief case on an oak table and sat down, watching the girl’s back. There was a tiny smear of lip rouge on the fold of her immaculately white collar.

She stopped typing and took the sheet from the machine, adding it to a pile in the basket on her desk. Then she turned and said, “You must be Miguel Rinehart. I’m Miss Woods.” Miguel nodded gravely.

“Is that the new script? I’m dying to read it.”

Olinder’s appearance in the doorway saved him from having to answer.

Miguel stood up and Karl put a hand on each shoulder and said, “Michael, its good to have you back.”

“Good to be back, Karl.”

“You’ve met Miss Woods?”

Miguel nodded.

“You look a little tired.”

“I didn’t get much sleep on the plane. Somehow I manage to wake up every time the pilots change prop pitch.”

Olinder’s appearance never changed, Miguel thought. Men such as he were the kilometer stones of life, standing like markers to tell you how far from youth you had strayed.

His head was bald, but no balder than it had been in 1938. Hairless was not a comparable adjective. His face was no more wrinkled, and even the rumpled gray tweed suit looked like the suit he used to wear at Roslyn.

“Tell me about your trip,” Olinder said, decently avoiding a direct look at the brief case Miguel had laid on the golden oak table.

“Nothing to tell, Karl. Just what I wrote.”

“Two letters. Two in nearly a year.” Olinder lit a fresh cigarette from the stub in his hand and sucked smoke deep into his lungs. Miguel could close his eyes and remember the dark schoolroom at Roslyn, the scribbled blackboard, and Karl with a cigarette between his lips pacing the floor and reading Milton aloud to six drowsing juniors.

“How’s J. C.? Well, I trust.”

“At the top of his form. He got me a couple of assignments from Réalités. The motor race in Monaco and a fiction piece.”

“I saw them.”

“That’s about all. He asked to be remembered.”

“Want to tell me about the new script?”

Once again, Miguel had that feeling of being a schoolboy with a faultily prepared assignment. “I was afraid that was going to come up.”

“We can go over it, if you like,” Karl said.

“It stinks, Karl.”

“Are you sure? You never were much of an editor, you know.”

“I hope I’m wrong. I would love to have you tell me I’m wrong. Only I don’t think you will. And I haven’t finished it.” He indicated the brief case. “It’s there. If you don’t mind, I’ll leave it with you. You can write me on the coast and tell me what you think in a week or so.”

Olinder ignored the script and said, politely questioning, “You’re going home, Michael?”

Miguel could feel the empty feeling in the pit of his stomach growing. “I don’t know yet.” He looked out the window at the blank glass faces of the buildings across the street. The expanses of window, reflecting the pale sun, gazed blindly back at him. “I’ve had the offer of a picture job,” he said.

“Oh? For how long?”

“Indefinitely.”

“What does Magnussen think?” Olinder asked. “But what am I thinking of? He’d be pleased, naturally.”

“He hasn’t made much money off me lately,” Miguel said.

“So he’s all for it.”

“It means a hundred a week for him if I sign the contract.”

Olinder’s eyebrows arched. “A thousand a week to start?”

Miguel said, “Yes.” He knew what Olinder was thinking—that even with his previous experience a thousand a week was high starting pay. And of course, the reason for the special treatment was Nora.

“It won’t leave you much time for serious writing,” Karl said.

“Don’t be such a snob.”

“I am a snob about writing, Michael,” Karl said, brushing a fall of ashes from his trousers with care. “Particularly about your kind of writing. I always have been, and I pray I always shall be.”

“Now you really sound like the Classical Lit teacher.”

“What else am I, really?” Olinder spread his long hands in an almost delicate gesture of inquiry. “If Roslyn hadn’t closed down, I would still be packing adolescent skulls with Donne and Milton. I liked teaching, Michael, and I was good at it. All good teachers are snobs at heart—though the nature of their job demands they hide their snobbishness. The nature of an editor’s job, however, makes no such demand, so I am telling you frankly. You are better than this. For you to go to Hollywood and spend your time writing adaptations of other people’s work is a criminal waste.”

“It’s a perfectly valid medium.”

“It could be, but it isn’t. And in any case, it’s not for you. There are few enough creative writers left, Michael. If the entertainment business keeps swallowing them up, what’s going to be left?”

“Of literature?” Miguel asked scornfully. “If Miss Woods weren’t here I’d tell you what I think of that.”

“Don’t let me bother you,” Miss Woods said. “I’ve proofread four-letter words you never heard of.”

“I’m really sorry about the book, Karl,” Miguel said. “As soon as I collect a few checks maybe I can return the advance.”

“I want that book, Michael.”

Miguel closed his eyes for a moment and almost surrendered to fatigue. He couldn’t argue with Karl about it now. His brain seemed clogged with weariness.

“Let’s go to lunch,” Olinder said. “You look as though you need a drink. And I can’t discuss this rationally without something to eat.” He told Miss Woods that he could be located at the Oak Room of the Plaza, but not to disturb him unless it was absolutely necessary. “If the downstairs office calls,” he said, “tell them I’m protecting an investment.”

At the Oak Room, Olinder ordered chilled consommé and coquille St. Jacques for both of them. He sipped his martini appreciatively and regarded Miguel over the table crowded with silver and glassware. “This is one of the few compensations of no longer being a teacher,” he said. “You can drink what you please when you please and no Burroughs Hamner to say thee nay.”

“You’re becoming something of a gourmet, Karl. Did Hillyer raise your salary?”

“Taste,” Olinder said, “need not be expensive. Nor cheapness inexpensive. It depends on the palate, the eye, and the point of view.”

“I’ll bet Wilde was sorry he didn’t say that,” Miguel remarked with a touch of irony. “Or did he?”

“No. It is an original Olinderism. You can use it in your next. I’ll make you a present of it.”

Miguel frowned. “I don’t know if there will be a ‘next,’ Karl. That’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Go on, Michael,” Karl said quietly.

“It isn’t something easy to discuss, really. I tried hard to work in Europe, Karl. I really did. I even went to see an analyst in Paris. I couldn’t talk to him. I guess I have a prejudice against wig-pickers. I knew he’d start talking about ‘writer’s block’ and sure as hell he did. But I couldn’t keep myself on the project. I ran away from it. You know, I was never satisfied with The Exile—I always felt I’d failed to do what I wanted to do with that story and this one was going to be the one that set things right. That’s a goddam laugh. I got so I hated the thought of working on it. I’d try to work and the least distraction would ruin the whole day. I skipped to Rapallo, you know, thinking maybe it was Paris that had me tied up. Memories or some idiotic thing like that. Only in Rapallo it was worse. I spent all my time drawing pictures of that old watchtower just off the breakwater. Phallic symbolism, maybe. But my God, I wasn’t even much interested in women. I’d just sit and stare at the sea and the time would slip by and I’d have done nothing at all and I’d be wondering what happened to the day.”

He toyed with the stem of his untouched cocktail glass and looked up at Olinder without moving his head. “You know one of the things I kept remembering? My sister Esther. The nun. There was something that happened a long time ago—just after my mother died—Well, it goes back farther than that, really. To a summer I spent on the Russian River back in thirty-two or three—” He broke off abruptly. “Look, do you really want to hear all this? I’m bushed and feeling sorry for myself and I feel like talking. But there’s no reason to make you listen if you don’t want to.”

Karl smiled faintly. “Michael, when are you going to learn no one is ever completely alone? Go on with it. I’m interested.”

“Well, I was roaming one day—alone. I used to do that a great deal. And one afternoon I stumbled onto a secret cove in the river and a couple—hell, I might as well tell you the whole thing. It was Ella Eubanks—Tom’s mother. And the father of one of the other kids up there. Billy Alberg. I don’t think you ever met him. He was in the Navy during the war. Anyway, no matter. Ella and Martin were having at it and I watched. I didn’t even know what the score was, but I knew it was something unusual. So I wrote it all down in my journal—I used to keep a journal—actually—with a picture, a sketch. I got the word from Tom about it. I told him it was a couple from a French resort they used to have up there. I couldn’t tell him it was his mother, for God’s sake. But that’s part of another story.

It’s the diary thing. About a year later, just after my mother died, my sister was getting ready to leave for the convent and she found the damn thing. There was hell to pay—”

He could remember the stinging humiliation of Essie with the book in her hand, open to the damning pages, and her voice, strident and shrill: “Slimy, filthy, hateful little boy—” And that moment had been all he needed to know that Esther had never loved him, had never even liked him. His sister, the flesh of his flesh, and all the jealousy and disgust for his maleness, and the loathing, sickening awfulness of knowing that she was going away now with this void to be filled with his humiliation. …

He passed a hand over his eyes. The memory almost made him physically ill. “I don’t know, Karl. What has all this to do with not being able to work, anyway?”

Olinder’s voice was very gentle. “Do you want to keep on writing, Michael?”

“It’s all there is for me,” Miguel said bleakly.

“No. There must be more, but I’ll agree it’s important. I know. But have you ever wondered why it’s important?”

“It’s a little late to start questioning, isn’t it? I’m thirty-three.”

“Thirty-three isn’t the end of life, Michael,” Olinder said. “When you’re over sixty as I am, you’ll understand that.”

“I feel a hundred and thirty-three,” Miguel said.

Olinder finished his drink and dipped a spoon into the consommé. “You’re feeling rather sorry for yourself.”

“Yes, perhaps I am. Yet what’s to be done about it? There are two sorts of writers, Karl. The storytellers and the flagellant penitents. Do I need to say into which category I fit?”

“Storytellers and penitents,” Karl said. “That’s an interesting notion. I wonder if your Catholic background has anything to do with it?”

“It’s possible, but I doubt it. It’s more likely the hyena tradition. Did you know that a gut-shot hyena will eat his own entrails?”

“Let’s get back to this penitent idea of yours. It’s intriguing.”

“You’ve heard the old literary joke, of course. ‘She wasn’t his first affair—she was his first novel?’ The penitent at work, Karl. Raking his flesh and screaming mea culpa at the top of his lungs. It’s a kind of therapy—an anodyne for living. But what happens when it jams up, when you want to scream and can’t? Sure, I feel sorry for myself. I’d feel sorry for any poor son of a bitch who was suddenly stricken mute. I start work and I can hear my father asking me what I have to say that’s so important that it must be huckstered to the public at three-fifty a copy. What can I say to the dear, departed shade? Nothing. Not one word. I’m not sure any more. I was once, but not any longer. So what shall I do? Look for the big, bright, obvious Causes? I can’t. They’re out of date. This is the year of the big book and I’ve defecated on the analyst’s couch. Give me an answer, if you can.”

Karl shook his head. “You know I can’t. You’re the only one—”

“To thine own self be true—Balls, Karl.” Miguel could feel frustration thick in his chest. “You know, you should really have known my father. He was a good businessman. A striking-looking guy. I used to worship him. Actually. Like a god.” He drew a triangle on the tablecloth with the tines of his fork. “His capabilities were limitless. Among other things, he killed my mother.”

“Michael,” Olinder said. “There’s no need for this.”

“I’m sure there isn’t. The skin crawls a bit, doesn’t it? The mind withdraws. I’ve gone too far and I’ve sickened you a trifle, haven’t I?”

“No.” Olinder paused, searching for the proper words. Finally he said, “I have known you for a long while, Michael. You might even say I have a stake in you. That gives me the right to meddle. I think I can read you well enough.”

Miguel smiled dryly “Leer y no entender es casar y no cojer. That’s a proverb. It’s also a double pun. The first part means ‘to read and not to understand,’ and casar means both ‘to hunt’ and ‘to marry.’ Cojer means ‘to retrieve’ and it also means ‘to cohabit.’ End of Spanish lesson.”

“You can be as sarcastic as you like,” Olinder said.

“I’m sorry, Karl. My control is really marginal today. This morning I damned near hit a man—a poor repellent slob just trying to do a job.”

“Listen to me.”

“I’m listening.”

“Stop running, Michael. For your own sake, stop running away. I’ve seen the things that have happened to you and I’ve seen your reaction to them. Twice now, you’ve taken off for Europe—and not really to work. That was only the excuse. Both times you were running from something you didn’t think you could handle. The behavior pattern is typical of you. It won’t work, Michael. It can’t work and you ought to know it. Consider this. Every ugly situation you’ve been involved in had another side. The other person’s side. To begin with, you’ll have to make yourself accept that before you can worry about your own. It might not be a simple case of mea culpa, after all. Have you examined that possibility?”

“Go on,” Miguel said.

“How can I say it? Lay the ghosts. Find out what you have to do and then do it. If you decide to go to Hollywood, I’ll be sorry—but who is to say it’s wrong for you? I think you’re a good writer, Michael. But as a man, you’re pretty badly fouled up.” Olinder fell silent and Miguel sat frowning at the tableware.

Karl asked, “Are you going to San Francisco?”

Miguel looked up. “I don’t know yet. Why?”

“I assumed you would, that’s all.”

“Have you heard anything from Alaine?”

“She was here for five days last May.”

Miguel’s brow knit and he said, “Oh. I didn’t know that. What was she doing in New York?”

“She’s working again. For that store in San Francisco. It was some kind of business trip. Buying or selling or something of the sort. I don’t know. I didn’t ask. I took her to see Tea and Sympathy. We had a marvelous time.”

“Congratulations.”

“Do I detect a note of jealousy, Michael?” .

“Of course not. Alaine is a free agent. She can do what she likes.”

“You hurt Alaine more than you’ll ever know, Michael.” Miguel said nothing.

“Of course,” Olinder said, tapping his yellowed fingers lightly on the tablecloth, “it is only natural for me to be prejudiced. I am very fond of Alaine.”

“I know you are. I also know you dislike Nora intensely.”

“On the contrary. I don’t dislike Nora. I wasn’t going to mention it, but now that you’ve brought it up, I’ll simply say that she and I have different ideas about what you should be doing with your talents.”

“Talents, crap.”

Olinder sighed. “All right. Put it down to the meddlesomeness of encroaching age. Only I’ve often wondered what happened with you and Alaine. You seemed so well suited to one another. What was it? Domesticity too much? Nora’s appeal too great?”

“Let’s just say I found out we deserved one another. In every way,” Miguel said.

“That doesn’t sound like an avowal of love to me,” Olinder said.

“Who said anything about love?”

“There is a very simple method of dealing with Gordian knots, Michael.”

When Miguel did not reply, he continued, “There’s someone we have assiduously avoided mentioning in the course of this psychoanalysis.”

“Let’s keep it that way,” Miguel said.

“All right, Michael. But may I warn you? You’re heading into a dangerous situation right now. I mean personally dangerous. You are in a peculiarly self-destructive mood. No, I don’t mean that in the physical sense. There are other ways. You, I’m afraid, are an expert at all of them. Be careful, please.”

“You make me look forward to the next twenty-four hours with interest,” Miguel said.

Olinder shrugged. “Be as flip as you like about it. The very least that can happen to you is that you’ll get tangled up with some woman. You do that regularly, you know. If something starts troubling you, you like to bury your head in some female breast. A return to the womb. That’s just what it is, you know.” “Christ, but we’re really Freudian today.”

“I’ve seen you do it more than once. It’s easy for you. Because it can be any woman, I think. And then she starts making claims on you and you feel trapped. I may be an old bald coot, Michael, but I know people. I know you. And it’s my guess you’ll subconsciously arrange something to allow you to put off tying yourself to Nora and her world for as long as possible.”

“So now we venture into the realm of prophecy, Karl? What makes you so sure Nora’s world is so bad? Can Hillyer offer a thousand a week?”

“We aren’t talking about the same things, are we?” Olinder’s expression was bland. “I’m talking about Miss Ames’ particular world.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Nora, Karl.”

“I didn’t say there was.”

“You didn’t? Perhaps I misheard you.”

Olinder lit a cigarette and drew smoke deep into his lungs. “Let’s get back to the book. This other isn’t getting us anywhere.”

“All right.” A headache was beginning behind Miguel’s eyes. He glanced at his watch to see that it was after one-thirty. “Why don’t I just leave it with you and call you, say, next Tuesday—after you’ve had a chance to look it over?”

“You go from here to Los Angeles?”

“Yes. No stopovers. I’ll get to San Francisco to see Dorrie as soon as I can.”

Olinder nodded and they finished their meal in a desultory silence. It was as though, suddenly, they had run out of things to talk about. Miguel was glad when Olinder said he had to get back to the office.

“I’ll call you, then.”

“All right, Michael.”

He walked as far as the lobby with Karl and left him there.

Then he picked up his key at the desk and went upstairs. His legs ached with weariness and the headache was beginning in earnest. In his room he called Nora’s suite, but there was no answer. He hung up the receiver and lay down on the bed. He was asleep almost instantly.

TEN

The ringing of the telephone woke him. It seemed to pull him up out of green depths with its shrill insistent bell. He opened his eyes and stared for a moment at the ceiling, trying to remember where he was. Then he reached for the phone and held the receiver to his ear.

It was Nora. “Oh, darling, did I wake you? You sound so fuzzy.”

“That’s all right. What time is it?”

“It’s after five. May I come down?”

Miguel rubbed at his eyes and swung his feet over the edge of the bed. “Yes, of course. I’ll leave the door unlocked.”

Nora laughed provocatively. “If Victor calls don’t tell him.”

“All right.”

“Did you see Olinder?”

“We had lunch here at the hotel.”

“What time?”

“Around noon or a little later. Why?”

“You should have called me.”

“I did. You were out.”

“Van Cleef and Arpels. Getting ready for tonight,” she said.

Miguel reached for a cigarette and lit it with one hand, twisting the paper match to scratch the head on the abrasive strip. “What happens tonight?”

“They didn’t tell you, for heaven’s sake?”

“No. Should they have?”

“Cocktail party at the Waldorf. The bankers will be there. I’ll explain when I see you,” she said. “In about two minutes, darling.” She hung up and Miguel sat for a moment with the dead phone in his hand. Finally he put it gently in its cradle and stood up. The street outside was in shadow. Around the corner of the building he could see a strip of Central Park. The sounds of traffic were an unceasing rumble rising out of the canyons of the city.

Miguel went into the bathroom and stripped. He got under the shower and let the water run steaming hot over his neck and shoulders. He thought about going out tonight with some distaste. He hated cocktail parties and he had hoped he and Nora would be able to get some time alone before flying west. Alone? What’s that, he thought sardonically. Having Nora sneak down to his room for a few minutes made him feel that nothing had really changed. They were still “having an affair.” And it began to look as though that, at least, would never change into something more regular. They would always be hiding from someone, or something.

He climbed out of the shower stall and toweled himself dry. He could hear Nora in the other room. She was ordering drinks from room service.

“Make mine a Bloody Mary,” he called.

“That must have been some lunch,” she called back.

He slipped on a traveling robe and opened the door. Nora, at the phone, blew him a kiss.

She was dressed in a green cocktail dress with a deep V bodice and she wore an emerald choker that made her throat look even whiter than it was. There were golden metallic flakes in her hair to match the setting of the emeralds. There was only one word for the way she looked. Spectacular.

He walked into the room, feeling the very faint evening breeze from the open window cool his still-wet hair. Nora stood up and came over to him, slipping her hands under his robe and lifting her mouth to be kissed.

She pressed hard against him and then stepped back, her eyes cavernous and dark with desire. “Careful. You’ll muss me,” she said.

“To hell with that.” He reached for her again, but she shook her head.

“No. Afterwards, Mike. We haven’t time right now.”

He sat down on the bed and lit a cigarette.

“What about me?” Nora asked.

“Sorry.” He offered her the pack and then held the lighter for her. “What about this thing tonight?” he asked. “I didn’t know we were going to be on display.”

“A thing for the bankers,” Nora said. “Victor is a little worried about backing for Green Hills. Tony’s set this up at the Waldorf. Cocktails, smarty talk, and money. Beautiful money.”

“Ask for it by name at any bank.”

Nora laughed. “That’s it. Seriously, darling. It won’t take long. Then we can get away by ourselves for a little while. There are a million things I want to talk to you about.”

“Such as what?”

“The trip. Did you miss me? Why didn’t you write more often? Did J. C. find you a little French doxy—”

“I knew we’d get to that. The answer is no.”

“I’m very jealous, you know.”

“Are you really? It’s something I never associated with you. Jealousy, I mean.”

Nora stood by the window and turned to look at him, pivoting on the ball of one foot and the heel of the other. “So you’ve forgotten? Don’t you remember that I used to cry when you left a party with Alaine? And I knew you’d be going home together, to undress in the same room, sleep in the same bed? You don’t remember that?” She laughed, tossing her head. “I’ll bet you don’t.”

Miguel stood up and studied her, the dark silhouette of her against the evening light. “Is that what you did, Nora? Cry?”

“What’s the matter, Mike?”

“Matter?”

“Something’s wrong, isn’t there?”

“No. Nothing’s wrong, Nora.”

“Are you sure?”

The waiter knocked discreetly. Miguel let him in and signed the tab. When he had gone he handed Nora her highball. “Let’s drink up. I’d better get dressed.”

“I like you the way you are.”

“Want to skip the shindig tonight?”

“You know I do.”

“Well, then?”

“We can’t, darling. It’s business.”

Miguel lifted the Bloody Mary to his lips.

“Wait a minute,” Nora said. “Salud y pesetas?”

“Y tiempo para gozarlas. Though I’m beginning to doubt we’ll have time for anything, let alone enjoying health and money.” The phone rang. Miguel picked it up.

“Mike, boy. This is Tony. Is Nora with you?”

Miguel held the phone out to Nora and she took it without hesitation. So much for good intentions, Miguel thought.

“Yes, Tony,” Nora said. “All right. In two minutes.” She put the phone down and said, “I’m sorry, darling.”

“Stop apologizing, Nora,” Miguel said. “What did he want?”

“He wants me to come down and meet him in the bar.”

“At least the son of a bitch isn’t lying in bed when he calls you. That’s something,” Miguel said.

“Mike,” she said reproachfully. “You’re not jealous—”

“Like hell I’m not. I’ve got a quivering id and an overstimulated libido. I’d like to punch the bastard in the nose.”

“For heaven’s sake, darling. You certainly don’t think there’s anything between Tony and me—”

“I don’t know,” he said, wondering why he was trying so hard to pick a fight with Nora and wishing he could stop. “He may live in New York but he’s a lotus-eater first class.”

“Yes? And what about me, Mike? Am I a lotus-eater, too?”

“No. No, Nora. You’re Miss Univac,” he said.

“Oh, you are in fine form,” Nora said. “Tonight is going to be lovely.” She walked quickly to the door and stopped. When he made no move, she sighed and came back to him, lifting her face.

Miguel felt himself respond. Like a tropism, he thought, like a paramecium and a point of light, my God. Nora’s hands caressed the back of his neck. He could feel her lips parting and the flick of her tongue against his. When she moved away from him, he was shaken and aroused.

Nora smiled at him and said, “Don’t be long, darling.”

The door closed behind her.

Miguel set himself to delay. He dressed slowly. He turned on the radio and listened to dance music, moving about the room with deliberation. It seemed important, somehow, to resist the impulse to follow Nora down to the bar.

It reminded him of something his father had once told him. He had asked advice on the best way to impress a girl who had taken his fancy, and Raoul had said, “Why, just leave her alone.” Raoul had known his women. Only the ends of his affairs turned messy. And when they did, he took a trip.

After Maria’s death, he and Miguel had flown to New York, an adventure in 1933. Miguel remembered departing from Oakland Airport in a Fokker Trimotor and following the mail route of the old DeHavillands: Reno, Elko, Cheyenne, North Platte. At Omaha, the Fokker was exchanged for a Ford Tin Goose that rumbled and rattled all the way to Roosevelt Field.

Dr. Winthrop had prescribed the trip. He thought Raoul should get away from the terrible business of Maria’s accident.

He had gone even further and insisted that Raoul move out of the city, into the quieter atmosphere of the deep Peninsula. So while Miguel and Raoul flew to New York, Luis saw to the purchase of land for a new house in Los Altos.

But the flight had made Raoul’s ankles swell and his lips turn blue and he had taken ill so quickly that Luis had to come all the way east to ride back with them on the train. Six days of misery, Miguel remembered, with Raoul gasping for breath and under a special nurse’s care.

In April of 1933, Miguel transferred from the Rockridge School to the Lakeshore School as a temporary measure.

Since their return from New York, Raoul had been confined to bed under the care of a Mrs. Berringer, a white-haired practical nurse. The house on Rockridge Terrace was sold and Miguel moved into his father’s apartment. The arrangement, Raoul explained, would hold only until the new house building in Los Altos was finished.

Esther was living with the Sisters, ready to begin her novitiate, and Miguel was left alone with his father. He thought very little about Maria. The whole awful business seemed indistinct to him, but he was troubled by nightmares that brought his father’s nurse running into his room at night with a sedative to quiet him.

The loss of Concha troubled him considerably, for he suddenly discovered how helpless he was without her. In time, he learned to care for his own belongings and do for himself the things that Concha had always done, but it was a tedious and unhappy process, for Raoul wasn’t always patient. “For heaven’s sake,” he would say, “do you mean to tell me you need a woman to tie your shoes for you?” The transition from living in a household of women to living in a bachelor establishment was not made without some bitter moments. But throughout, Raoul dominated and impressed Miguel so much that he imagined there was nothing he would not do to be like his father.

One afternoon late in March, Miguel arrived at the apartment from school and opened the lower door with the key Raoul had given him. Upstairs, in the hall, he almost ran into a woman carrying an overnight bag. He excused himself and stepped aside, but the woman stood looking at him. He could see that she had been crying, for her face was red and her eyes were wet. It made him acutely uncomfortable.

She put down the suitcase and said, “You must be Miguel.” Miguel shifted his weight from one foot to the other and said, “Yes, ma’am. I’m Miguel Rinehart.”

There was nothing remarkable about her. She was rather plump, with auburn hair and faintly green eyes. She wore a white silk frock with fringe on the hem and her wrists were heavy with bangles.

“Well, I’m Valerie,” she said. She took a handkerchief from her purse and wiped her eyes. She seemed agitated and faintly hostile.

Miguel looked at her blankly. The name meant nothing. “How do you do,” he said formally.

“You’re really much taller than I expected,” the woman said. “You look like him, all right.”

Miguel nodded. “You mean my father.”

The woman’s eyes lit up with anger. “Sure, I mean your father. Who did you think I meant?”

“I didn’t know, ma’am.”

The woman’s lips twisted. “Ma’am,” she mimicked. “Don’t you know who I am, for pity’s sake?”

Miguel backed away from her unconsciously.

The woman made a vague gesture with one hand. The bangles rattled. “Well, how do you like that? He didn’t even tell you my name, is that it?” She moved her face down close to Miguel’s. Her eyes were leaking more tears, but they seemed to be tears of fury. Miguel could smell brandy on her breath. “I’m La Roja,” she said with a flash of bitterness. She pronounced the Spanish words with an atrocious accent. “I guess you’ve never heard anyone speak of me any other way, have you? It’s as if I was dirt and didn’t have a name.”

Miguel took another step backward and came up against the wall. The woman grated at him, “I’m not going to bite you! I’m not going to get you dirty! I just wanted to see you. You could have been my little boy, you know . .

For some reason, the thought filled Miguel with horror. He shook his head and said, “No.”

The woman began to cry. The sobs came out of her in jagged pieces. “I hate you, you little son of a bitch. I hate you. He’s sending me away because of you and I hate you, I could kill you—” She wheeled suddenly, picked up her case and ran down the stairs. Miguel stood pressed against the wall, staring after her. His heart was pounding and there was a bitter, salty taste in his mouth.

He thought of his father and this woman. They did it together. Like Martin Alberg and Ella Eubanks. His stomach heaved and he tried to swallow the bile that crept up into his throat. Almost instantly, his mind rejected the picture forming there. It couldn’t be. The woman was lying. His father wouldn’t. Not with a woman like that.

He picked up his books and walked slowly down the hall to the door of his father’s apartment. His eyes were narrowed and his lips set thin and tight in the pale mask of his face. “Crazy old dame,” he said aloud. “Crazy old goddam bitch.”

Mrs. Berringer, the nurse, opened the door and said, scandalized, “Here now, young man! What sort of talk is that?”

He ran past her into his father’s bedroom. Raoul was propped up in bed, sheaves of papers and blueprints all around him. He looked up when Miguel burst into the room.

“What is it?” he asked.

“There was a woman out in the hall, Dad,” Miguel said. “She—she said things—” He finished lamely. Suddenly he knew he could not tell Raoul what the woman had said to him. Mrs. Berringer, who had followed him into the sickroom, raised her eyes toward the ceiling in a despairing gesture.

Raoul said, “I’ll handle this, Mrs. Berringer.”

Miguel watched her walk stiffly out of the room and then he looked at his father.

“Come over here and sit down, hijo,” Raoul said.

Miguel sat down on the edge of the bed and waited. Through the window, he could see Lake Merritt shining in the afternoon sunlight.

“The lady you met,” Raoul said, “is—was a friend of mine. She came to pick up a few things she had here.”

“Did she live here before I came to stay?”

“Sometimes,” Raoul said.

“Is she the one Essie said you wanted to get married to?”

“Esther misunderstood,” Raoul said. “Valerie has simply been good to me from time to time. There has never been any thought—on my part, at least—of marrying her. Esther, being a woman, wouldn’t understand that. But I expect you to.”

“Yes, sir.” Miguel looked at the floor and asked in a low voice: “Was she your—mistress?”

Raoul looked shocked. “Is that what you get out of those books you read? That kind of talk?”

“No, sir.”

“I think you and I are going to have a talk soon,” Raoul said. “But for now, lets just say Val isn’t coming back here any more.” “Because of me, Dad?”

“Not just because of you, son.”

“But partly?”

“Well, partly. You don’t want to worry about it.”

Miguel thought of the agonized way the woman cried and a tingle of remorse ran up his spine. He shouldn’t have called her what he did. She probably hadn’t meant the things she said. She was only hurt and angry because she couldn’t come back any more since he had come to live with Raoul. He wanted to say something to Raoul about the woman, something that would make him understand he didn’t need to make her go away just because of him, but he couldn’t. Raoul didn’t seem to want to talk about it and Mrs. Berringer and Dr. Winthrop both had told him that he should do nothing, ever, to upset Raoul. His heart was bad and he could die.

Mrs. Berringer knocked and came in with Raoul’s digitalis and a glass of water. When she left, Raoul said, “Ben Shriker was here this morning.” Shriker was the architect Raoul had engaged to do the Los Altos house. “Come over here and look at the drawings. This is your room.”

Miguel moved closer to his father. He could smell the sickish sweetness of rubbing alcohol and the faint mustiness of the warm bed. Raoul unrolled some more plans, showing a rambling, single-story house on a knoll. He tapped on the thick blue paper with his fingertips.

“The outside is redwood and brick. Lots of window space.”

“Is Luis coming down with us?”

“Becky and Luis plan to live in Palo Alto. That’s seven miles north.” Raoul put his arm around Miguel’s shoulders. “You’ll like it down there, son. We have five acres of ground and a view of the valley—”

“Is there enough room for a swimming pool?”

“Maybe. There’s a country club nearby. Luis is checking into it. And it is just five miles to Roslyn School, where you’ll be going to high school.”

It was the first Miguel had heard of any plan to send him to a private preparatory school. He knew about Roslyn from Junior Freeborne who went there. It was a small school, with an enrollment held at thirty to forty students. It aimed at preparing you for the College Board examinations. He had heard it cost a great deal of money to go there.

“Are we rich, Dad?” he asked.

Raoul laughed. “I wouldn’t say we’re rich, son. We have enough. Let’s put it that way.”

The thought of having “enough” was curiously satisfying. “I’m only in the high sixth,” Miguel said. “I won’t be ready for high school for a while yet.”

“Roslyn will take you from the eighth grade. I investigated this school thing and Roslyn is absolutely the best. I called that teacher of yours—Mrs. Meacham. She recommends it very highly. And Oliver Eubanks is sending Tom there—if he can get him in.”

“Golly, Dad. Old Tom. That’s marvelous.”

“Mel Guthrie is planning on sending his boy. You’ll have lots of friends. I want you to have, hijo. You’ve always kept to yourself too much. Remember, a man’s friends are his most valuable possessions.”

“Yes, sir.”

Raoul began rolling up the house plans. Miguel, not wanting to be dismissed yet, asked, “What about the Nereid?”

“We’ll leave her where she is. San Francisco is only an hour’s drive on the Bayshore Highway.”

“When do we go, Dad? Soon now?”

“Anxious? Well, so am I, hijo. We’ll go as soon as I’m on my feet again. Dr. Winthrop says in about two weeks. But I have to be careful, you understand that, don’t you?”

“Oh, sure, Dad,” Miguel said earnestly.

Raoul’s hand tightened on Miguel’s shoulder. “Your old father was a pretty sick man, son. It looked bad there for a while.”

Miguel felt a tiny knot of fear inside him. Nothing seemed quite secure any more. Concha and Essie gone, and Maria—Raoul said in a heavy voice: “Hijo, you and I have got to stick together. I need you. Luis is my son, too, but it’s never been quite right. We’ve always been more like brothers than like father and son. I suppose when Luis and Esther were born I was still too young and too busy to be a father to them. In Esther’s case, I’m paying for it now. The Sisters have her for good and that’s all right if that’s what she wants. But with you, I want it to be different.” He cleared his throat and took off his glasses, so that he had to squint against the light from the window. “That awful thing with your mother—”

Miguel’s entrails griped suddenly and a hot wetness sprang into his eyes. He bit his lip so he would not cry. It was a sudden and a painful thing, this attack of bitter hurt and melancholy that descended out of a misty memory to engulf him.

“—that terrible accident—” Raoul broke off, his voice choked with emotion. “We must do everything we can to forget it. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. You must always remember that. It was an accident and we have to wipe it right out of our minds. It’s the only healthy way.” He stopped to look away, rubbing his glasses. After a moment, he went on. “We are going to make a new life, hijo. A whole, new, wonderful life.”

Three weeks before the house in Los Altos was ready for occupancy, Raoul allowed Miguel to accept an invitation from the Freebornes to spend ten days on the river.

Miguel had looked forward to going back, but nothing was the same. The dusty gravel road hadn’t changed, nor had the madrona forest or the slow, green river. But the feel of it was all different. Strange to him.

Tom couldn’t come up, and Billy Alberg and Sandy were running with a different group. Miguel felt like an outsider and he avoided them after one or two encounters.

Junior Freeborne, a tall and sallow adolescent with red eyes and acne, was more interested in gathering specimens for his insect collections than in being a host to Miguel, and after three or four days grubbing under logs for beetles, Miguel took to avoiding him, too.

Mr. and Mrs. Freeborne were very considerate, but they whispered about Maria all the time when Miguel was around, as though they derived some dreadful satisfaction from an endless recital of the circumstances surrounding her death.

Miguel grew moody and restless. He found the secret beach again and noted that its configuration had changed like everything else. The winter rise of water had swept the fine sand away and transformed the quiet cove into a rocky lagoon.

He swam alone, sketching, sunbathing and reading. He no longer kept a journal, but he had begun to write fanciful stories, most of which he tore into tiny pieces and scattered on the slow current.

One evening he walked down the road to Patches and stood before the shuttered, silent house in the dusk, listening to the sound of the breeze in the treetops. He felt lonely and depressed, thinking of Maria and Concha and Anson and Essie.

He was glad when the ten days were gone and he was returned home. His second summer on the river was, in a sense, a farewell. He never returned there.

In the fall he started at the local Los Altos School. He made few friends. In what was essentially a rural community, he was a city kid. He knew without being told, with the preternatural awareness of his age, that this strangeness would wear off in time but that there was nothing he could do to speed the process.

The new house was in every way satisfactory: on a hilltop with a view of the valley and a long gravel drive. From the window of his room he could see the great silver hive of the dirigible hangar at Moffett Field and the flat acres of orchard lands between Palo Alto and San Jose.

Raoul’s heart mended slowly, but in the spring he and Miguel and Luis were able to sail the Nereid, taking trips as far up the river as Petaluma and Stockton.

The day would begin with a drive up the new Bayshore Highway, into San Francisco and along the Embarcadero with its great gray piers and towering ships and the smell of roasting coffee and cocoa. They would drive past the tower of the Ferry Building where the orange-painted Key System ferryboats docked and Luis would tell Miguel of the day he was on the Peralta when too many passengers had rushed forward and the fat ship had plunged her open bow into the waters of the bay and people had been washed overboard. And after that came the short ride to the St. Francis Yacht Club where the Nereid lay moored in the basin with all the other clean-lined white boats with the gulls wheeling and cawing among the lines and pennons.

Raoul always looked terrific in his white flannels and brass-buttoned blue coat and yachting cap.

And then they would sail out of the anchorage with Raoul at the wheel and old Morgan, the crewman, just standing by and complimenting Raoul on the way he handled the boat. Sometimes they would cruise to Paradise Cove and visit some of Raoul’s friends on other boats, and other times they would sail up the river to Stockton, hailing the side-wheelers Delta King and Delta Queen as they thrashed by in a frenzy of white water.

One weekend around Easter, Raoul had taken Tom and Ollie along on a trip to Sacramento and something went wrong with the Nereide’s engine and they had all taken the Delta Queen back to the city, leaving Morgan with the Nereid.

With Tom, Miguel had roamed the ship, running races around the top decks and scrambling up and down the stairways—ladders, Oliver said you should call them—and finally ending up at the dutch doors made of steel where they could look down into the engine room where the great pistons turned the oily, glistening shafts with a steady, thrumming sound like the beat of tympani. There was always a rush of hot, oil-smelling air coming up out of those depths and Miguel and Tom could watch the sweaty, shining men moving about their incomprehensible tasks in the underwater bowels of the ship.

The following July, Raoul and Luis took Miguel on a month’s stag trip into the high Sierra country. They fished Lake Tioga and the streams and creeks in the area, sleeping on the ground in down bags and drifting through the mountain counties in search of trout. Miguel loved the hissing light of the Coleman lanterns at night in a high camp, the leaping shadows of the cooking fire, and the clear, brilliant stars seen through the branches of the pines.

Raoul said the mountains were good for his health, and it was true that Miguel had never seen him looking better—tall, bronzed by the sun. To see Raoul gracefully casting a dry fly into a white water pool was an almost sensual pleasure. And the sudden strike of a Rainbow on his own line was a tactile thrill Miguel never forgot.

Raoul had acquired a new 1934 La Salle, and loaded with gear, Luis at the wheel, they drove through rock-strewn Hope Valley and over the narrow, winding road through Picketts and Markleeville to Carson’s Pass, eighty-six hundred feet above the sea.

They camped that night at The Spur, and while Luis made the fire and pitched the tent, Raoul took Miguel out onto the great stone outcropping to watch the sun set into the murky valley to the west.

From where they stood, a steep talus with granite striations fell away for almost a thousand feet into a deep river canyon. On the other side, the ground rose in a great, monolithic watershed eroded by a hundred streams and rivulets. The pines, looking like ming trees in the distance, grew starkly out of the rocks, their roots bedded in the gray stone. The deep green of the conifers, the purple tones of the evening shadows, the white of the rushing water and the red fire of the sky combined to make a panorama of breathtaking beauty.

Miguel looked toward the sunset where the valley plains could be seen through the broad V of the canyon. They were hazy and distant, lost in the glare of the sinking sun, no part of the high mountain solitude. Out of the immense hollow below them came a continuing sound like the whispering of a thousand voices. It was the echo of the falling water and the murmur of the wind in the trees.

“When your mother and I first came to California,” Raoul said, “we found this place.” Miguel thought he could detect a note of sadness in his voice. It was as though, Miguel thought, he were mourning for something vanished from his life. Presently, Raoul said, “I want a promise from you. I want you to tell me that some day you’ll stand right here and do something for me.

Miguel waited. He felt protected and secure beside his father, feeling the rough cloth of his sleeve, the weight of his arm.

“I want you to scatter my ashes here,” Raoul said.

Miguel’s throat constricted and he wanted to protest, but Raoul wasn’t listening.

“No one else can do it but you, Miguel. I want you to remember that always. No matter where you are, anywhere in the world—when I die I want you to come back here to this place and do this thing for me.”

Miguel promised. He told himself that he would never really have to do it, because somehow, he would die first. But afterwards, when he had thought a great deal about it and could face the knowledge that surely, in the natural course of things, he must do what Raoul asked, he accepted the responsibility with a sad pride. By the time they had returned home, Miguel felt that Raoul had given him a man’s trust.

Late that summer, Becky and Luis were married. They took an apartment in Palo Alto. Luis taught Miguel to drive on their Essex business coupé.

Miguel found himself at home in the country around Los Altos. The hills lay sere and brown in the California sun and the sky over the Santa Clara Valley was clear for days on end. He found a favorite ridge not far from home: a ridge and a knoll crowned with a stand of white oaks. He could stand there and see the valley floor from Milipitas to San Jose and north as far as South San Francisco. He learned the place had a name, Frenchman’s Tor. He liked the familiar sound of it. There was a rutted dirt road winding up the hillside, traversing until it reached the crest and climbing straight up to the rounded knoll five hundred feet above the prime and apricot orchards.

He often went there with Aldyth Wylie, who went to the Grammar School down on San Antonio Road. Allie was a rather large, rangy girl with perpetually skinned knees and a funny way of wrinkling her nose when she laughed. It was the laugh, Miguel often thought, that made Allie a better companion than any of the others he had met during spring term. It was a gay sound, but never silly. When Allie laughed you wanted to laugh with her and not at her the way you did when some of the other girls laughed and giggled.

He took considerable teasing because of his friendship with Allie Wylie, but he didn’t really care. Allie had an Iver Johnson bicycle like his own, except that it was a girls model and had a guard over the sprocket. And she could ride it better than any of the boys at school. She didn’t get herself all painted up with lipstick the way so many of the seventh-graders were doing now, and she didn’t make you uncomfortable by acting silly when adults were around.

Sometimes Miguel took Allie to the movies in Palo Alto in the evening. Of course, Raoul wouldn’t let him take a car, but Avery, the colored man Raoul had hired to do odd jobs around the house, would put on his dark suit and a cap and drive them in the La Salle. Luis liked to joke about “Miguelito’s dates” but

Miguel didn’t mind. Taking Allie to the movies wasn’t like having a real date. It was just going with somebody you liked and could talk to and feel at ease with. That was the best part of being with her. He sometimes would explain to Luis that it wasn’t like going out with a girl at all, but that wasn’t exactly right. You didn’t ever forget Allie was a girl. You just didn’t hold it against her.

One day, some weeks before Miguel was scheduled to start at Roslyn, he and Allie rode up to the Tor. It was hot and dry, with the star thistles and wild oat spores thick in the dry grass. They hid their bicycles in the brush at the base of the hill and climbed to the knoll, where a cool breeze was blowing.

Miguel had stolen six cigarettes from Raoul’s desk and he offered one to Allie. She sat beside him under one of the oaks and smoked it, making a face each time she drew smoke into her mouth. Finally, she put it out and said, “I don’t think much of that habit. Why do you suppose people do it all the time?” Miguel put his own cigarette out carefully and sighed. “I don’t know. You want some gum, Allie? To take the smell of cigarette off your breath?”

Allie peeled a stick and popped it into her mouth. Her face was tanned. It was broad through the cheekbones and the golden skin framed a full well-shaped mouth. She wore her sunburned blond hair tied back with a black ribbon.

“Does your father know you smoke, Mike?” Allie asked. Miguel shook his head. “I could tell him, though, I’ll bet. And he wouldn’t get mad about it.”

Allie laughed and pulled her skirt over her knees. “My folks would be furious.”

“You don’t smoke so much,” Miguel said condescendingly.

“I don’t really smoke at all,” Allie said. “Only a couple of times with you.”

Miguel pointed up into the flat expanse of blue skies. “Look, Allie.”

A great silver dirigible whirred in lazy flight over the valley. Miguel could see the red, white and blue star on its flank and the broad Navy strips on the tail surfaces.

“It’s the Macon,” he said. “Isn’t she a beauty?”

They leaned far back against the tree holding their hands high to frame the slowly cruising airship.

“Would you like to fly in her?” Allie asked.

“That’s lighter-than-air. I’d rather fly heavier-than-air planes.”

“That sounds so funny.”

“What does?”

“Lighter-than-air. It sounds like a kind of dance.”

“It only means the ship is lighter than the volume of air it displaces. When it’s full of helium gas, that is. You know we have the only helium wells in the whole world? And we won’t let the Germans have any for their dirigibles?”

“I think that’s mean,” Allie said. “It wouldn’t hurt us to let them have some.”

Miguel sighed comfortably and closed his eyes. Presently, Allie asked, “Is it true you’re going to Roslyn School next year?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to Miss Harlow’s in Palo Alto.”

“I thought you were going to Castilleja,” Miguel said.

“No. I have to go to Miss Harlow’s because Mother went there.”

They fell silent for a time. An ant crawled slowly up the seam of Miguel’s corduroy trousers. He flicked it away with a finger.

“I’m going to miss you, Allie,” he said. He felt the blood come into his cheeks as he said it.

Allie regarded him with grave, dark eyes. “Well still go on seeing one another, won’t we?”

“Well, I guess so. If you want to, that is.”

“Of course I want to. Didn’t you think I would?”

Miguel dug at the earth with his heels. “I wasn’t so sure,” he said, not looking at her.

“We’re friends,” she said in a slightly aggrieved voice.

Miguel turned to look at her. He felt uncomfortably warm. He moved his hand over until it touched hers lightly. She did not take her hand away.

“We’ll always be friends, Allie,” he said. “I would be very sorry if we weren’t.”

She was smiling again and everything was all right. Moved by a sudden impulse, he kissed her lightly on the cheek. She put her hand to the spot his lips had touched and looked at him, surprised. He felt his heart pounding in his throat. He leaned forward again and kissed her on the lips. He swallowed hard and said, “Allie—?”

“Why did you do that?”

He looked away and said clumsily, “I guess I want you to be my girl.”

She looked at him for a long while, gently, almost sadly, and then she said, “All right, Mike.”

“Will you be? Really?”

“All right,” she said again. And then she laughed. “But don’t look so unhappy about it.” She was on her feet, brushing the stickers from her cotton dress. “I have to go now,” she said.

Miguel stood up. “I’ll be here tomorrow,” he said tentatively.

“Ill be here too.”

A new and unaccustomed shyness possessed him. She touched her lips and began to walk down the hill. When she reached her bicycle, she turned and waved to him. He waved back. And when she was riding away and he was sure she could not hear him, he shouted, “Allie—I love you!” Then he ran down the hill with great loping strides.

ELEVEN

The cocktail party turned out to be everything Miguel had expected it to be. The room, a double suite opened up to accommodate the press of moneymen, picture exhibitors, reporters and photographers, agents with something or someone to sell, critics with knives to bury, show people, socialites, columnists and free loaders, was not nearly big enough to provide circulating space for everyone. Nevertheless, people circulated. Spilling drinks, rubbing buttocks, squirming through—they circulated.

The noise had been detectable as far away as the elevator, but when the door was opened by one of the red-faced uniformed maids, the blast of sound was like a roar out of bedlam.

Nora had been whisked away by a mincing young man who designed clothes and Tony Ayula had plunged into the melee with every evidence of relish. Ziegler had introduced Miguel to a dozen or so people whose names he promptly forgot and who forgot his as quickly. He found it impossible to talk to anyone, nor had he seen anyone he wanted to talk to besides the perspiring barman.

He stood near the bar with a martini growing warm in his hand, listening to the shrill bits of conversation that bobbed to the surface of the turgid roar.

Nora, across the room, was surrounded now by paunchy men in banker’s gray. The hip-swinging dress designer was still prancing before her, accenting his rapid-fire talk with wide,

Nora caught his eye and pursed her lips at him and he wondered if he really looked as sullen as all that.

Tony Ayula appeared out of the crowd and grinned at him. “Having a ball, Mike? Isn’t this the greatest?”

“I’m living,” Miguel said. “Really living.”

“The joint is crawling with VIPs,” Tony said. “That’s Halloran over there talking to Nora. Bank of New York. He owns forty-two per cent of Artfilm. Mon-ee, friend. Big money. And the guy next to him trying to grab a feel is Vincent Clay. Pasadena, Pebble Beach. And twenty-seven per cent.”

“If Mr. Twenty-Seven Per Cent doesn’t take his penny-picking paws off Nora, I’m apt to reduce his holdings for him,” Miguel said.

Tony laughed. “Hell, boy. A moneyman has got to dream. It’s part of the territory. Nora can handle him.” He banged Miguel on the back and disappeared into the press with two manhattans held at shoulder height.

Miguel finished his martini and picked up another. A large, dark-haired woman stationed herself in front of him.

“You’re Miguel Rinehart,” she declared aggressively. “I recognized you from the picture on the dust jacket of The Exile.” Her lipstick was purple and her mouth had a rather marshy look. Miguel’s face felt wooden. He wondered if he were getting drunk.

“Oh, God, I simply loved that book. I cried. I wept like a baby when I read it.”

Miguel’s tongue seemed stuck to the roof of his mouth. He couldn’t think of a single thing to say to the woman. She wore a strapless wired dress of shiny amber color. Her breasts were enormous. The cleft between them was like a ravine between two burial mounds.

“But tell me, for God’s sake, why you had to make the crippled man so unsimpatico. He was a perfect horror. He turned my blood to ice water.”

Miguel said, “I’m sorry.” It was an idiotic thing to say, but somehow he didn’t think it would matter.

“Oh, Christ. Don’t be sorry. You gave me the thrill of my whole literary experience. When Laura went back to that hideous husband without any legs—Oh, God …”

Miguel could feel an icy trickle of sweat on his ribs. The woman’s voice seemed to pierce his skull. The great, white breasts surged and heaved.

He said thickly, “I’m sorry. I have to go.” He turned and shoved his way into the crowd, leaving the amber woman standing by the bar.

He stopped by the windows and looked down into the canyon of darkness and light forty stories below. A waiter passed him with a tray and he reached for another drink. His throat felt hot and dry.

Ten feet away from him, Victor Zeigler, dressed in a dark blue gabardine suit, was telling a group of men about the changes that would have to be made in Kathryn Bellamie’s book to cut production costs. Katie, he was explaining, was in Haiti with her fourth husband and was leaving everything in his, Victor’s, hands—which was what all novelists should do, he added jovially, when their books were made into films. The man seemed to be acting out a part, Miguel thought. It was as though he carried a sign on his royal-blue gabardine back. A sign that said: I AM A PRODUCER.

Miguel listened to the mass of people trying to out-scream one another, he watched them waving their hands about, giving shape to dreams, conveying alcohol and intricately fashioned tidbits of caviar and cheese and anchovy into the constantly working apertures in their faces. He was filled with an almost overpowering loathing for all of them. He knew he was being unfair. There were decent people here, there had to be. But they were all hidden, their worth as human beings camouflaged with mink and flashy jewelry and expensive tailoring.

He turned to a glassy-eyed man standing next to him and said, experimentally, “You make me want to vomit.”

The man smiled twistedly and replied enthusiastically, “It really is a brawl, isn’t it?”

Miguel shook his head and looked out the window. He could feel the liquor pumping through him. He wanted to leave before something went really wrong.

“Get me a drink, darling?”

He looked around to see that it was Nora standing at his side. “Hello,” he said.

“A drink?”

They walked over to the bar and Miguel handed her one of the specially watered cocktails Ziegler insisted she drink. “You don’t even get a proper shot,” he said. “If I were you I’d bitch like hell.”

She smiled at him. She seemed to be having a wonderful time. He felt like a spoil-sport as he said, “How soon can we clear out of here?”

“Do you want to go right now?”

“Do you, Nora?”

“I shouldn’t. Victor will be terribly upset if I leave.”

He felt leaden inside. “Is this rat race doing you some good?”

“I imagine so. Victor is very pleased.”

“And boola-boola Ayula is happy as a clam,” Miguel said. “Delighted as a hog in a bog.”

Ziegler appeared and took Nora by the arm. “I want you to meet some people, Nora. You’ll excuse us, Mike?”

“Of course. Naturally.”

Nora gave him a flashing smile. “And stay away from your amber admirer with the great white bosom. I was watching you.”

“Eyes like an eagle,” Miguel said. “Like a hawk.”

“It won’t take a minute, Nora,” Victor said. His eyes were alert now, not dull and filmed as they had been in the morning at the airport.

Miguel watched them vanish into the crowd. He picked up another martini. He felt sure that if he took several more he could keep ahead of the depression that kept stalking him. He spilled a bit on his suit as he lifted the glass. He thought of something old Tom used to say with that familiar, go-to-hell grin on his face: “Might as well be drunk as the way we are.”

Tom. Oh God, he thought. Tom was the crippled man of The Exile. Tom was the lonely one, the dead man hung around the neck of his destroyer like a bloody chicken wired to the neck of a killing mongrel dog—

I should never get drunk, he thought fearfully. God, I should never get drunk.

The glass in his hand was empty. He reached for another and stood, rocking back and forth slightly, letting the babble of senseless talk wash over him in stinging, disconnected sprays.

A woman said, “She got into my apartment and took photostats of every letter he ever wrote me. The checks, too. Oh, I tell you.” Her red-painted mouth moved like the lips of a fish in a tank.

A man’s voice said, “Everyone knows he’s a lush. He’d cheat his mother out of her last buck to buy himself a skinful. But, hell, I don’t want to say anything against the guy.” Miguel turned around, but could not separate the speaker from the crowd.

He glanced at his watch. It had stopped with the hands at eight-forty.

He found himself caught up momentarily in the incomprehensible currents of alcoholic sociability, exchanging vacant conversation with a thin brunette who wanted to talk about dogs.

“John and I plan to have a kennel. No, I’m really serious about it. He wants to get away from the city because of the A-bomb and I said to him, really, what can you do in the country? To make a living? Well, he said there was no reason we couldn’t make a living raising dogs because I was such a bitch, after all. Isn’t that a scream? I wish you could meet John. He’s around here somewhere.” She wandered off vaguely looking for John and Miguel found Victor Ziegler at his side.

“Having a good time?” Ziegler asked.

“Not particularly,” Miguel said. “The drinks are good.”

Ziegler spread his hands. He looked suddenly tired and aging. It was as though the shellac coating of the harried businessman had cracked to let the inner core of ennui through. “It’s necessary,” he said. “You can do nothing without money.” He sipped sparingly on a Scotch highball. “This party will cost Artfilm five thousand dollars. It will earn us a hell of a lot more.’’

Miguel looked around for Nora. He couldn’t locate her.

“Your trip was difficult?” Ziegler asked.

Miguel put down his empty glass and lit a cigarette. The room was foggy with smoke and noise. “Not bad,” he said. “Rough between Paris and Shannon. The rest of it was all right.” The liquor lay hot and thick in his stomach. His lips felt tight-skinned and he could feel his pulse in them.

“It’s been years since I was in Paris,” Ziegler said, “1935 it was.”

“You wouldn’t recognize it now.”

“I suppose not.” Ziegler’s eyes kept searching the room restlessly. If a Somebody appears untended, Miguel thought, hell bolt. For some reason the notion of Ziegler bolting amused him. He decided to make a game out of keeping Ziegler’s attention.

He asked, “You made films in Europe?”

“In Germany, until the Hitlerites took over. Then in Hungary. Finally, in 1935,1 arrived in Paris. But there was nothing there for me. I followed Lubitsch to America.” Ziegler pursed his lips thoughtfully.“A man cannot know where the four winds will blow him.”

“You’ve never wanted to go back?”

Ziegler’s eyes looked dark and liquid in the gross fleshiness of his face. He looked at his highball and said, “To Germany? No. never.” He paused and then said distantly, “My wife and I had a small apartment near the Kurfursten bridge—you know Berlin?”

“Not well.”

Ziegler shrugged. “It was a pleasant little flat. Two rooms and a kitchen. I was working for UFA then. Things were not easy, you understand. But we were happy enough. On the Sabbath, when work of any sort is forbidden, we used to hire a neighborhood boy to light our candles. A big, handsome youngster—blond like our son. We hired him because my wife was very devout and we could not light the candles ourselves. It would have been a breach of the Jewish Sabbath—”

Miguel was disturbed to see tears standing in the dark, far-seeing eyes. I didn’t want this, he thought. He wished Ziegler would stop.

Zeigler said, “We called him a shabbas goy—You know Yiddish?”

Miguel shook his head:

“In 1933, our shabbas goy came to the house in a brown uniform. I was fortunate to be away, out of the country at the time.” He sipped at his highball carefully. His eyes had gone flat and opaque again, searching the room. “It was a long time ago. But you see why I never went back. I am no longer devout, either. A man must change with the times.”

Someone behind them shrilled, “Jesus Christ, that’s the best one I’ve heard tonight! Listen, Carmody told me this one—about the two dogs who were better off than people: they could both watch television?”

Ziegler smiled thinly in the direction of the voice and said, “Shall we get another drink, Mike? I’d like to talk to you about the job.”

At the bar, Ziegler continued. “You’ve had screenwriting experience?”

“Yes. Two of my books were filmed. I worked on the screen versions with Frank Steinmetz. You know him?”

“A good craftsman.”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Steinmetz,” Ziegler said, “is in South America. We will not be able to get him for Green Hills. It will have to be your screenplay without help from anyone. If I seem blunt, forgive me, I am a businessman. I once thought of myself as an artist—when I was only directing and didn’t have to worry about financing and distribution and production problems. But now I am a businessman with a product to sell and I must be sure you want to do this picture.”

“I’ll be just as blunt, Victor,” Miguel said. “Nora wants me to do it and I would like to please her. But I’m not certain about what I want to do, not just this minute.”

“I see,” Ziegler said.

“I don’t think you do. I can understand your point of view. Actually, writers aren’t as woolly-headed about money as people think they are. If I do this picture, Victor, I’ll be doing it for the money. But I’ll give it the best I have.”

“That’s fair.”

“I’m a novelist. I don’t know why a man should decide to try making his living by writing books. All I know is that it’s the one thing I’ve been consistent about all my life. There might be a good Freudian reason for it. I don’t know. What I’m trying to say, in my slightly tight way, is that I may be the wrong man for you. It’s something we’ll have to work out. I may as well go the whole way and tell you I need the money badly—but I’ll have to think about it.”

“Mike,” Ziegler said, “if you need money in a lump sum for anything, it can be arranged. I know about these things. We could even arrange to have the money deposited to your account here in New York or even abroad, where there are no community property laws—”

“This is the second time this thing has come up,” Miguel said. “Are you concerned about my wife?”

“If she is giving you trouble about money—”

“What the hell, Victor,” Miguel said angrily, “didn’t Nora tell you Alaine could buy and sell the lot of us? If I need money it’s for Nora, not for Alaine.”

Tony Ayula pushed his way to them and whispered in Ziegler’s ear. Ziegler said, “All right, Tony, I’ll attend to him.” To Miguel he said, ‘Tm sorry again. We’ll talk about it later.” Miguel watched his beefy back disappear in the crowd.

Tony Ayula moved close to Miguel and said in his ear, “That Clay fellow from Pasadena tried to lock himself in the can with one of the starlets and the goddam dame made a scene. Jesus, what a guy has to go through.”

Miguel started to walk away, searching for Nora. Ayula followed him. “Say, did you go to school in the east, fella? I keep thinking I’ve seen you before.”

“I went to Stanford,” Miguel said shortly. “Where’s Nora?”

“I wouldn’t bother her right now, fella.”

“Where is she?”

“She’ll be here in a minute. Take it easy. Have a drink.” Miguels eyes grew dangerous.

“Oh, for chrissake, Mike,” Ayula said reproachfully. “She’s out on the terrace talking to Halloran—the bank guy. She’ll be back in a minute.”

Miguel could feel the tenseness growing inside him. There was a taste of salt in his mouth. The shrill talk and laughter pierced his ears painfully. He started for the sliding doors leading to the dark terrace.

Ayula’s hand closed on Miguel’s arm. “Now wait a minute, fella. You can’t just barge in out there. Nora will blow her stack.”

“Take your hand off,” Miguel said in a dead voice.

They stood in a tiny clearance in the crowd. People were turning to look at them curiously. The big woman in the amber dress started to laugh. “Somebody’s tight,” she giggled.

Ayula said, “Come on, cool down a little. Let’s have a drink.” He pulled at Miguel’s arm.

Miguel’s head felt tight, as though it were wrapped in wet rawhide. There was a climbing spiral of fire in his stomach, in his chest. He spun around and hit Ayula.

Ayula stumbled backward, striking a waiter’s arm as he fell.

A tray of drinks overturned into the press. A woman screamed as ice cubes and liquor drenched her naked back. Tony sat on the floor, holding his hurt mouth.

Miguel turned and pushed through the crowd to the terrace. He could see Nora standing with Halloran in the darkness. The cool air made his head ache. Nora turned toward him, her astonished face illuminated by a shaft of light from inside. People were staring out into the night, their expressions blank and curious at once.

“Nora,” Miguel said. “Let’s go.”

“Mike—whats the matter? What happened in there?”

“I just knocked Ayula on his can. Let’s get out of this zoo.” Halloran moved bulkily in the darkness. Miguel turned on him.

“Now take it easy, young man,” Halloran said, frightened.

“Mike! For heaven’s sake, what’s the matter with you?” Nora’s voice was shrill with displeasure.

“I’m drunk and I want to get out of this stinking bedlam,” Miguel said. “Get your coat, Nora.”

“Just wait a minute, Mike—”

Miguel felt as though he were trapped in a vat of sticky ugliness. He was sure that if he didn’t get out he would crack wide open.

“I want you to come with me, Nora,” he said doggedly. She would come. She had to. When it came right down to it, he thought, they belonged together. “Let’s get going,” he said.

“Now listen, Mike. We can’t just walk out like that. Now, please. Everybody’s watching us.”

“All right, so everybody’s watching…” He didn’t mean to raise his voice, but he found himself shouting. Someone said behind him, “What a disgusting spectacle, really.”

Nora stood before him, her eyes glittering with humiliated rage. “Stop all this this minute,” she said in a hissing voice. “You’re making a fool of yourself and of me!”

“Please, Nora. Let’s get out of here. Shall I get your coat?”

“No.” She turned her back on him and walked to the edge of the terrace. She walked as gracefully, he thought, as though she were doing a part in a picture. Cut from two-shot to high angle of Nora Ames—Fury shook him. The voices behind him were chattering hysterically. He turned around and said, “Shut that goddam door!”

“Mike, in the name of heaven—” Nora was facing him with her face pale and bloodless. “There are people in there who are going to pay your salary.”

He took her by the shoulders and said pleadingly, hating himself for begging, “Nora, let’s get out—”

She twisted away from him. “You’re drunk,” she said.

Anger bubbled up like hot lava in his throat. “Little Nora,” he said, “Nora the V-girl and Nora the beach girl and Nora Goddam Ames, the big personality—”

He felt the stinging crack of her palm against his cheek. “Thanks,” he said. “I needed that.” He wheeled and brushed against Victor.

“What’s the matter here,” Ziegler asked, wide-eyed.

“Next week East Lynne,” Miguel said, and pushed by.

Nora caught him. “Where do you think you’re going?”

He threw off her hand and walked swiftly through the murmuring crowd.

It was ten-fifteen when he reached the Plaza. He went to his room and threw his clothes into his bag. He called the desk and told the clerk he was checking out. Then he called the travel desk.

“I want space on an airplane to San Francisco. Tonight. I don’t care how you get it—just do.”

“We have a cancellation on Continental Flight 666 departing from Newark at eleven-twenty-five, sir. Shall I confirm that?”

“Yes. Make it fast.”

“One moment, sir.”

There was a short wait that seemed an eternity to Miguel. His hands were still trembling with anger. He lit a cigarette and then almost immediately crushed it as the voice on the telephone said, “Yes, sir. We can confirm that space for you. Will you pick up your ticket at the Will Call Desk? And will you require limousine service, sir?”

“No.” A cab would be quicker.

“Very well, sir. If you will be at the terminal fifteen minutes before departure time.”

Miguel hung up. Almost immediately, the telephone rang. He let it ring. Presently it stopped.

He called for a bellman and went downstairs into the lobby.

He settled his bill and walked out into the night. Fifth Avenue was heavy with traffic and across Central Park South he could see the lineup of hansom cabs waiting for customers.

Overhead, the winking lights of an airliner circled and headed west.

TWELVE

Miguel sat in the restaurant with an untouched sandwich and a cup of steaming coffee in front of him. He was trying not to think about Nora, but there was still a bitter fusel-oil taste in his mouth that grew stronger when he thought about the fight.

He remembered one night, long ago, when he and Nora had planned on a weekend together and had stopped for a drink somewhere along the line and Nora had grown suddenly reluctant to go on with him. They had fought bitterly, but in the end she had gone along. But that was another Nora, the old Nora. The new was flintier than that.

That phone call just before he left the hotel room, Nora, of course. Or, if she were too proud to do it herself, she would have gone to Victor to call. Or even, Miguel thought wryly, Tony. Poor Tony with his mashed lips and loose front teeth. Unconsciously, he rubbed his skinned knuckles.

The clock on the wall stood at eleven-ten. Fifteen minutes to wait before boarding the San Francisco flight. He lit a cigarette and smoked slowly, drinking his coffee.

It occurred to him that he seemed condemned to an eternity of sitting in terminals, waiting for flying machines to carry him from one place to another. He felt a deep weariness that was more than physical.

He was undecided about what to do now. The Hollywood thing looked very tenuous and uncertain and he could not force himself to care. First things must come first and instinct seemed to be guiding him. If he belonged anywhere in the world right now, it must be somewhere on that fingerlike dollop of land between San Francisco Bay and the Pacific.

He paid for his coffee and walked through the rotunda and into the concourse where the passengers for Continental’s westbound 666 were gathering in the tiny lounge. He took a paperback copy of A Farewell to Arms from the newsstand rack and fumbled in his pocket for change. Then he sat down on the hard leatherette seats to wait for the gate to open.

He felt incredibly alone in the cold, harshly lit waiting room. It made him wonder if he had the kind of courage he had pretended to have back at that monstrous cocktail party. Nora loved him, in her way. It simply depended on what you meant by love.

He had a sudden panicky impulse to go to a phone and call her. But the gateman had opened the sliding doors and was collecting the boarding passes now as passengers filed out toward the waiting airplane. There was no time. He stood up mechanically and walked into the chill September night.

Miguel’s Christmas present in 1937 was a new ‘38 Chevy convertible. He had been saving his money for more than a year toward the purchase of a Model A Ford like Tom’s but when the time came to go look for the car, Raoul decided that he didn’t want Miguel riding about in a rattletrap and he had presented him with the red convertible.

Miguel, who had been looking forward to hopping up the Model A with Winfield carburetors and a Rajo head the way Tom had done with Horace Greeley, was rather deflated.

Oliver had given Horace to Tom when he came down to Roslyn, and there had been so many warnings about “going west” in the car—“going west” being an expression World War pilots seemed to use often—that Miguel had immediately given the car the great editor’s name and it had stuck.

Miguel had helped Tom with the work on Horace and they both took a great deal of pride in the fact that when Horace ran at all it could outrun almost any make of automobile. There was no contest between the Ford and Miguel’s car, but Tom had promised to help Miguel work over the Chevy, too. There were plenty of speed-increasing modifications that could be made. The only thing was that it would have to be done without Raoul finding out. Two weeks after giving Miguel the car Raoul had begun to say that he was reckless and that he had made a mistake in giving Miguel the car before he was sixteen and there was endless talk of taking it away from him.

Luis had a Chevrolet, too, a new one that Raoul had suggested he buy at the same time he bought Miguel’s car. The suggestion was in the nature of a royal command, and Luis complied, though he didn’t seem happy about it.

Luis was still working for Raoul, but their relationship didn’t seem to be as friendly as it should have been. It was shot through with a kind of rivalry Miguel found hard to understand.

One Saturday, shortly before the end of the year, Miguel stopped in to see Luis at the apartment in Palo Alto. He found him alone, a tall drink in his hand, and music playing on the big Farnsworth he had bought for Becky over Raoul’s objections.

“Hi, Luis. I’m not disturbing you?” Miguel asked.

“Come in, glad of the company.” He closed the door. “Have you had lunch? Want something to drink?”

“Coffee, maybe,” Miguel said, eyeing the highball.

Luis grinned. “Some other time for a drink of this, jóven. I don’t want the patriarch on my neck for teaching you to like this stuff too early.”

“Where’s Becky?”

“Shopping, I suppose,” Luis said. Miguel noticed the odd stressing of the last word. It was strange Luis wouldn’t know where Becky was on a Saturday, but he didn’t feel he should comment. He took his cup of coffee into the living room and sat down.

“I like that music,” Miguel said. “What’s it called?”

“Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.”

Miguel listened quietly until the end of the record.

“I appreciate that,” Luis said. “You keeping still, I mean. You have no idea how many people tell you they like music and then try to drown out the melody with jabbering.” He picked up another record and put it on the machine. “This is one of the Brandenburg concerti,” he said.

When the record ended, Luis went into the kitchen and refilled his glass. The rain pattered against the windows.

Miguel said, “I guess Becky doesn’t like this kind of music much, does she?”

“No,” he said shortly. “You can’t appeal to the intellect with a woman like Becky. She responds to much more basic stimuli ” He seemed to be talking to himself rather than to Miguel. “If I hear that goddam thing about the music going around and around once more, I’m going to throw it out in the street.” He sat down without putting anything else on the record player. “How’s the car?” he asked.

“It’s fine,” Miguel said.

“You don’t sound exactly enthusiastic.”

“Oh, I like it, Luis. Tom thinks it’s great and so do all the rest of the guys. No one at school has anything near as good.”

“Only?”

Miguel studied the inside of his coffee cup. “Well,” he said after a time, “it’s just that the Model A I wanted would have been more fun. Tom was going to help me work on it—Oh, I don’t know. We are going to do some things to the Chevy, too. But we have to kind of sneak—you know what I mean? It’s like the car wasn’t really mine.”

“Yes,” Luis said. “I know that feeling.”

“Allie thinks the car is swell, though.”

“It’s a great little machine for the money—lots of car for what you pay.” There was a real edge of sarcasm in Luis’s voice and

Miguel remembered his father using exactly the same words, often.

“Well, it is a good car,” Miguel said defensively.

“Sure it is. Only it wasn’t what you wanted, was it? It was more. It was what Raoul wanted you to have. There’s a difference there. Think about it.”

“I have thought about it. Old Tom tells me I have rocks in my head.”

“We are brothers after all,” Luis said cryptically.

Miguel asked, “Do you like what you’re doing, Luis? The copra business, I mean?”

Luis was suddenly wary, somehow, and concerned. “Why do you ask me that? Has Dad said anything about my leaving the office?”

“Leaving? You aren’t, are you?”

“Has Becky been talking out of turn? God damn it, that woman has the intelligence of a full-grown Chihuahua.”

“Nobody has said anything as far as I know,” Miguel said. “Not to me, anyway. I was just wondering if you liked the business, that’s all. I guess I ought to start thinking about it now that I’m in prep school.”

Luis seemed to relax. Some of the tension went out of the thin, handsome face. “It’s a way to make a dollar,” he said.

“But do you like it?”

“I like it,” Luis said flatly.

“I don’t think I would,” Miguel said thoughtfully. “What I want to do is write. Books, I mean.”

“Ay, chamaco,” Luis exclaimed laughingly. “So you haven’t outgrown that?”

“No. I don’t think I’m going to, either.”

“Have you talked with Dad about this?”

“In a way. He always says I can do anything I want. But that’s not really so, is it, Luis? I mean, for instance, I wanted to go to Sacramento on that Scout Jamboree and he said I couldn’t. And the time Tom and I wanted to go down to Carmel and camp on the beach? I couldn’t do that, either… . Tom had to go with Guth Guthrie instead. I get the feeling Dad just says I can do what I want, but he thinks I’ll end by doing what he wants instead. And he wants me to go into the business, I think. He says he wants to keep me with him.”

“And you want to write books.”

“Yes. Only I don’t want to be a disappointment to him.”

“You think you can write? I understand it isn’t easy.”

“I don’t know about that. But I have to try. Not right away, maybe. There are things I have to learn about first. Oh, I do write. All the time. You saw that story in the Ramblings, didn’t you? Most of my stories aren’t very good, but Mr. Olinder say’s it proves something that I know when they aren’t very good. And I’m getting better, too, all the time. But I still have to make plans about it and figure out what I’m going to take in school. Mr. Olinder says the creative writing school at Stanford is the best in the West. Dad would be pleased if I went to Stanford.”

“That’s true,” Luis said with a touch of irony. “He could keep an eye on you there.”

He lit a cigarette and studied the burned-out match in his hand. “I don’t think I can help you much, Miguel. I’d like to. But I’m not good at giving advice about these things. And I have my own mind to make up.”

“How do you mean?”

Luis rattled the ice cubes in his glass thoughtfully. “I guess I can tell you. Becky will probably spill the beans before long, anyway, damn her beady little eyes. But keep it to yourself until the bubble bursts, anyway.”

“Sure. I will, Luis.”

“I’ve been offered a job with the State Department. Latin-American information specialist of some sort. It’s a fine opportunity to do something worth while. Things have been happening since the war in Spain. It looks as though Europe is going to hell in a basket, and Latin America is going to get much more attention from us.”

Miguel thought sadly of Anson Wilbur. It seemed impossible that he was dead, that there would be no more post cards in his mangled Spanish. He wondered how Essie felt now. Was she sorry she had sent Anson away?

“Well, golly, Luis,” Miguel said doubtfully, “that sounds fine. Only it would mean going away, wouldn’t it?”

“It would mean that, all right. South America probably. The Argentine or maybe Chile or Peru. I can’t be sure, of course. Dad doesn’t really need me any longer. Dr. Winthrop says he can work. Anyone who can climb around mountains like he did the last two summers can’t be very sick, that’s certain.”

“What does Becky think?”

“She hates it. Doesn’t want to leave the Peninsula. She’s found a home here, she says.”

“Well,” Miguel said, “I hope it works out all right.”

“It will work out,” Luis said. “I’ll see that it does. But remember, boca cerrada. Dad wouldn’t like it if he found out and I’m not ready yet to have him tie the can to my tail.”

“Dad wouldn’t do that.”

“Your faith is refreshing,” Luis said dryly. “Remember, I’ve known him longer than you have.” He went out into the kitchen and refilled his glass again. He glanced at the kitchen clock and muttered, “What the hell is keeping that bitch anyway?”

“Can we hear some more music?” Miguel asked.

“Help yourself. Be careful of the needle.”

Miguel selected the “Polovtsian Dances” from Prince Igor and sat back to listen. But Luis was restless and wanted to talk.

“What does your pretty little blonde think of you being a writer?”

“Allie? She says I should do what I want. Her father is always trying to talk me into studying law, but Allie says to pay no attention to him.”

“She’s a clever girl.”

“She’s—well, I don’t know. Just about perfect, I guess.”

Luis laughed. “What is this, love?”

Miguel flushed. “I don’t know.”

Luis regarded him steadily. “You’re about that age, Miguel. Has anyone taught you to be careful?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You’ve been going steady with this girl for two years, haven’t you?”

“Just about. Of course, we don’t see each other much in the summertime since Dad always wants to go away for the whole vacation.”

“What I mean by careful is just exactly that. Consideration, too. You don’t want to get her in trouble.”

“You mean by going the limit? Honestly, Luis, we’ve never done anything like that.”

“Don’t be so scandalized, little brother. There’s nothing dirty about it, you know. But you should always do a woman you sleep with the courtesy of loving her. Even if it can’t last long. That’s worth remembering, I think. We’d all be better off if we kept it in mind.” He smiled thinly at Miguel. “Have you any idea of what I’m talking about?”

“Yes,” Miguel said in a low voice. “And I guess you could say I’m in love with Allie.” It embarrassed him to talk of these things and use words like love. It made him think of those silly upside-down clinches they used to use at the Chimes Theater to advertise John Gilbert and Greta Garbo.

“Well, if it ends,” Luis said, “I should say ‘when it ends,’ but you don’t think it ever will right now so I won’t—if it ends, be kind enough to tell her so. Before she finds it out for herself and starts figuring ways to make you love her again. People do that, you know. Even girls who aren’t anything more than just children.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Luis.”

“I don’t suppose you do. But take my word for it. If she ever loses you she’ll try to get you back. It won’t be smooth or smart because she’s just a child. But the thing shell offer won’t be silly or kid stuff, either. It’s the same for any age past puberty. Every one wants to be loved, Miguel. A person will do foolish things to make someone love them. So be careful. If you need anything, and you don’t want to talk to Raoul, you can always come to me. I’ll do my best for you.”

Miguel squirmed uncomfortably, thinking that he would rather die than do anything nasty to Allie. She wasn’t to be thought of in the same way that Ella Eubanks was, or even some of the other girls like Flossie O’Connor who had mugged with him and let him feel her breasts at Midge Kimball’s party.

Luis was smiling at his discomfort. “We Rineharts are a fast maturing breed,” he said. “And what I’m trying to say to you in my own stumbling way is that you must never settle for less than love. For a man of your blood it isn’t such a responsibility as all that. Sex without affection can be a pretty degrading thing. I’d hate to see you have your first experience the way I did, with a tart in a brass bed. You get started that way and you develop a weakness for chippies.”

Miguel wondered if he were talking about Becky. He remembered a day last summer when she had been out at the pool alone and had asked him to rub her back with suntan oil. The memory was both disturbing and exciting. She had loosened the strap of her halter and turned her back to him and said, “Rub, silly. With both hands.”

He had done as she asked and he remembered the feel of her flesh, hot from the sun. Then she had said, “Lower, umm—that feels so good.” And she leaned back against his hands to increase the pressure. “I love to have my back rubbed,” she said languorously. And he said, “You have very smooth skin, Becky.” Then she had said for him to run more down on the sides and he had slipped his hands down to her hips and worked them up, kneading her firm flesh in small circles, feeling the expansion and contraction of her rib cage as she breathed and then, finally, in a rush of unfamiliar sensation, the fleshy softness of her breast muscles. And she had laughed softly and said, “You’re really a Rinehart, Miguel.” And as if that weren’t enough, Raoul had come down the path from the house just then and seen it all and had been furious for more than a week.

Now Miguel wondered if there were something like that that made Luis say things about tarts and chippies. It couldn’t be, he thought. After all, Becky was his wife.

Luis had grown very moody and a little tight.

“Luis,” Miguel asked. “Do you like women? I mean really?”

“Like them? Women are a work of art. Anything that complex has to be.”

“They’re complex, all right,” Miguel agreed, trying to be worldly.

“Complex?” Luis contradicted himself with a bewildering and sudden anger. “They’re as simple as bitches in heat.”

Miguel was taken aback and didn’t know what to say. Luis was angry and he couldn’t see why. They sank into a gravid silence. It was late afternoon and still raining when Miguel took his leave. Luis was drunk and Becky had not returned.

On Washington’s Birthday, a holiday for all Peninsula schools, Miguel’s crowd gathered at Allie Wylie’s house on Moody Road for Cokes and some dancing.

Allie had some new Larry Clinton records, and her father had given her an electric phonograph for Christmas.

Miguel arrived about seven, and Mr. Wylie, a small and leathery little man with a faint Scottish burr still left in his voice, abandoned the library to Miguel and Aldyth.

Mrs. Wylie, a large and formidable woman, came in to warn Allie about playing the phonograph too loud because her father would be upstairs working on some important contracts. Mr. Wylie was a partner in the law firm of Brigham, Wylie, DeFore and Rossi with offices in San Francisco and San Jose, and he was a past chairman of the County Republican Committee. He had been a delegate at the national convention that nominated Alfred Landon for the Presidency and was, in general, an important man. He often advised Miguel to study the law, because, he said, “With this pack of crackpots in Washington, there will always be work for lawyers.”

He and Raoul were not particularly friendly, though their politics were the same. They played golf at the country club occasionally, and once Raoul had consulted Mr. Wylie about a demurrage dispute. Miguel had the feeling that Mr. Wylie did not completely approve of Raoul, and he knew that Raoul thought Mr. Wylie a thoroughgoing bore.

Allie was wearing a new dirndl with a deep boat neck and a flared skirt. Miguel was always amazed at the transformation that took place when Allie put aside the white middy and black skirt of Miss Harlows for something more grown-up. It made her seem much older than he, for one thing, and he wasn’t sure he liked it. Allie had had her sixteenth birthday the week before Christmas and Miguel wouldn’t be sixteen for almost a month. Allie liked to tease him about being younger than she and most of the time he took it well. But when she looked the way she looked tonight, with her hair softly arranged about her face, her lovely throat and bosom exposed, and her legs in silk stockings, it made him feel very unsure of himself and in danger of losing her. He hoped there would be no teasing tonight.

Allie put a record on the turntable to show Miguel how the machine worked and they sat on the big leather couch holding hands.

“Would you like a Coke?” she asked.

“Sure. Ill get them. In the icebox?”

“Refrigerator, silly.”

“I keep forgetting. Concha always used to call it hieleria. That’s just plain icebox. She never did get used to not having to hang the ice sign in the window.”

Miguel, who had the run of the house, went into the kitchen and rummaged for the Cokes. Mrs. Wylie came in and Miguel said, “Good evening, Mrs. Wylie.”

Allie looked a great deal like her mother, lacking only her size. Mrs. Wylie was a little taller than Mr. Wylie and to Miguel, she seemed the most competent and imposing woman in the world. She did everything and did it well. She even played a good game of golf and had her name on one of the cups in the trophy case at the country club.

“Is it still raining, Mike?” she asked.

“Not very hard. It said on the radio it was supposed to clear up tomorrow.”

Mrs. Wylie said, “Those poor people down on the highway.”

Miguel knew she meant the people at the Okie camp down 0n El Camino. Hundreds of families had been drifting into the Santa Clara Valley looking for work in the prune and apricot orchards, but there wasn’t enough work for them. Last year the orchardists had dumped their fruit crops rather than take the low prices the canners were paying.

Mrs. Wylie often took baskets of food and warm clothes down to the camp, but the Okies wouldn’t always accept them. They weren’t as shiftless and eager for charity as people said. What they really wanted was work, but there simply wasn’t enough work to go around. Miguel had seen emaciated children down there, half-naked in the winter cold. He had written a story about them that Mr. Olinder had thought good enough to print in the Roslyn Ramblings, but Raoul had laughed at it and the other parents had complained. Only Mrs. Wylie and Aldyth had said anything complimentary. The headmaster, old Honeypot Hamner, had told Mr. Olinder he didn’t want that sort of thing in the school magazine again.

“If you go out tonight,” Mrs. Wylie said, “I want Aldyth home before midnight. Tomorrow is a school day.”

“We’ll watch the time,” Miguel promised.

“And don’t make too much noise in the library.”

“We won’t, Mrs. Wylie.”

The swinging door closed behind her and Miguel heard a car drive in. From the rumbling noise it made, he knew it was Tom’s Model A.

He uncapped four Cokes and carried them into the library. Tom and Florian were already on the couch necking and Allie had closed the French doors leading into the entrance hall and the stairway so that Mrs. Wylie wouldn’t come down and catch them at it.

Miguel put two of the Cokes in Tom’s lap so that he had to sit up quickly and grab at them before they spilled. He took the other two over to the corner where Allie stood by the phonograph.

“Are those two just going to spend all their time mugging?” Miguel asked.

“We’ll be good, Spicko,” Tom said. “And if we can’t be good we’ll be careful. And if we can’t be careful, why, well name the little bastard after you.”

“Oh, Tom, that’s awful,” Flossie said, sitting up.

“Don’t be cruel to him, Floss,” Miguel said. He looked at her warily. She had been pretty angry when he had failed to ask for another date after Midge Kimball’s party. But she seemed all right now, running her fingers through Tom’s spiky hair and giggling.

Tom rolled over so that he lay across Florian’s lap and yelled softly, “Rape, rape! I’m being raaaaped!”

“Hold it down to a low roar, will you?” Miguel cautioned. “Allie’s father is right upstairs.”

“Oh, God,” Flossie said. “And I was just going to ask if anyone had a cigarette!”

“If you’re going to spend all your time mugging each other,” Miguel said, “get on your feet and do it standing up. Then you can always tell Mrs. Wylie you were dancing.”

Tom nuzzled Florian’s neck and said, “We’re not hot, we’re just affectionate.”

Allie started the phonograph and held out her arms to Miguel. The mellow sound of Dorsey’s trombone flowed out of the speaker. Tom reached out and turned off one of the lamps. Miguel and Allie danced without talking. She reached about to his eyes so that he held his lips against her temple all the while Dorsey and a complex of voices sang “Once in a While.”

Allie’s hand felt warm in his, her straight back was pliant and slender in the circle of his arm. There was a clean smell about her, but faintly musky with the scent of her. It wasn’t perfume or soap, he knew, but rather just the right combination of tastes and odors that meant Allie.

She looked up at him and laughed deep in her throat, that laugh that touched him so. “You’re so solemn,” she said.

“I was thinking about you.”

“I’m glad.”

He pressed his mouth against her hair and held her closer than before. There were times he loved her so much it was a physical pain, times he could not speak for wanting her.

He wondered if she felt this way too. She must, because when she kissed him he could feel that she did. Lately there had been a demanding quality to everything they did together. It was different from what it used to be. This wasn’t a girl with skinned knees and no lipstick. This was Allie, who loved him and was his girl.

He glanced over at Tom and Flossie. They were necking again and he felt a stab of real envy. He wished he could throw himself at any girl the way Tom could. Then there wouldn’t be this fear down inside that he would do something wrong some day, something he wanted to do, but something so terrible that it would cost him Allie.

He remembered that on New Year’s Eve at the country club he and Allie had gone out to sit in the back of the car, and Allie had been wearing a red formal and Miguel had slipped the shoulder strap off and bared one breast and had kissed it and then Allie had begun to cry and she had said that she wouldn’t have let him do it except that she loved him so much she wanted him to do it.

They had almost broken up after that, with Miguel thinking that something bad might happen to them if this went on. But in the end he couldn’t break up with Allie because she was his girl and nothing was going to change that.

“There’s the bell,” Allie said. “That must be Sandy and Midge.”

Miguel liked Midge Kimball. She was a rather plain girl with dark hair and pleasant features and a good figure. She was one of the best dancers in the crowd and now she was going steady with Sandy Johnson, who came down from the city every weekend to take her out.

Sandy had changed a great deal since the river days. He played football for Lowell High now. He was short and heavily muscled but he was a terrific center and he said he was already getting calls from alumni who wanted him to go to college here or there.

This would be Tom’s last year at Roslyn, Miguel knew. The example of Sandy Johnson was too much for Oliver. Besides, Tom said Ollie couldn’t afford to send him to Roslyn any longer and there was the question of getting an athletic scholarship like they were offering Sandy. Tom would have to go someplace where he could play football for his last two years of high. Sandy had talked him into Lowell so it looked as though the two would be teammates next fall. Miguel and Allie and Florian had already promised to drive up and see most of the games.

They turned up the music and listened to Allies new Clinton records and then the collection of Benny Goodman things. They danced to “These Foolish Things” and stomped on the floor to “Don’t Be That Way.”

“Just listen to that Elman go, will you?” Sandy cried ecstatically.

“That’s James, not Elman,” Florian said. “Can’t you tell?”

“Well, that’s Jess Stacey, and that I know,” Midge said with her eyes closed.

Mrs. Wylie knocked on the panes of the French doors and frowned.

“We’re making too much noise,” Allie said.

“Why don’t we go down to Garland’s?” Tom suggested.

“Sounds terrif,” Flossie said.

“What’s on at the Varsity?” Midge asked.

“Swingtime, with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire,” Allie said. “Mike and I saw it Friday night.”

“Oh, you would,” Midge said.

“We’d rather go to Garland’s and have a beer,” Sandy said. It was the one place they could always be sure of being served, and there was a place to dance.

“Well,” Tom said, “let’s put the show on the road, then.”

“I’ll get my coat and tell Mother we’re going out,” Allie said. She went out and Midge said, “At least why don’t we go to L’Omelette? That Garland’s place gives me the creeps.”

“The reason, lovely one,” Tom said, “is that we can’t get a beer there.”

Miguel grinned at Midge. “We tried last week and Andre asked us to leave. In French.”

Allie came back with a bright red raincoat around her and a scarf for her hair. “All set,” she said.

They started out the door onto the front lawn when Mrs.

Wylie called Miguel back and said sternly, “Now you be very careful. Its raining and I don’t want to worry.”

“Ill be careful, Mrs. Wylie.”

“See that you are.”

The cars were parked in the circular drive, Horace Greeley, the red Chevrolet, and the Johnsons’ Mercury sedan.

“Why don’t we all go together?” Sandy suggested.

“Horace leaks,” Florian said.

“We’ll go in Spicko’s car,” Tom said. “In the rumble.”

“Are you crazy? It’s raining,” Midge cried.

“So? We’ll close the hatch. Floss and I vant to be ah-loan,” Tom said.

“We can’t all fit in the Chevy,” Sandy said.

“You and Midge take the Merc,” Tom said. He opened the rumble seat of the Chevrolet and pulled Florian up beside him. When they had settled down on the floor, he said, “Byeee—” and slowly closed the seat, making sure the latch didn’t catch.

“Come on, Midge,” Sandy said. “We’ll leave these dopes in their tracks.”

Miguel followed the taillights of the Mercury out the drive and onto Moody Road.

Sandy was driving fast on the wet road and Miguel had to work to stay near him. He grinned at Allie and she moved closer to him. “I’m glad we came out,” Allie said. “I wanted to be alone with you.”

“We’re not exactly alone,” he said.

“Tom doesn’t count. He loves you almost as much as I do.”

It made Miguel faintly uncomfortable to hear Allie say that. It was true Tom liked him. He liked Tom, too. He was going to miss him when he went back to the city to school. But guys didn’t love each other. They were just friends, that’s all.

“Mike,” Allie said softly.

“Yes, Allie?”

“You remember when I was sick and couldn’t go to Midge’s birthday party?”

Miguel had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. “Yes,” he said. “I remember.”

“Somebody said you and Florian were—well, necking. Were you?”

“Who said so?”

“Some of the girls at school. Were you?”

“The old biddies, why cant they just shut up, anyway.”

“Tom said it wasn’t true.”

Miguel saw a glimmer of hope. “Tom said that? Well, sure it isn’t true, Allie. I wouldn’t do that. Hell, old Floss doesn’t interest me that way, that’s all.”

“Is that the truth, Mike?”

“Allie, I don’t care for anybody but you. You know that, don’t you?” And that was true.

She laughed a little. “I know. But if I weren’t around and some girl wanted to be real friendly … I think maybe you wouldn’t say no.”

Miguel remained silent, watching the taillights of Sandy’s car through the rain-spattered windshield.

Allie sighed. “I don’t want to give you a third degree just because I was sick and missed a party. I’m sorry. I truly am. I just love you so much I want all of you for myself.”

“I wish we were married, Allie,” Miguel said. “Then things like what happened New Year’s Eve wouldn’t be wrong and we could do what we wanted whenever we wanted to do it—”

Allie buried her face in his shoulder and said, “Oh, Mike, I want so much—it frightens me, really. When you touch me I get all melty inside.” She looked up at him, her face somber in the dim light from the dashboard. “I want you there—is that so awful? Does that make me cheap and dirty?”

“Oh, Allie.” He wanted to stop the car and take her in his arms, but he was afraid of what they might do if he stopped right now. He put his arm around her and went on driving with one hand.

Allie giggled a little and said, “You should hear what Daddy has to say when he sees kids driving along this way.”

“I can imagine. ‘They shouldna be allowed ta drive a car til they’re too bored wi’ one another ta sit so close.’ ”

Allie laughed delightedly. “You sound just like him.”

They reached the railroad crossing at Fremont Road and Miguel passed Sandy and turned toward El Camino. The headlamps of the Merc moved in close and hung there. Miguel reached up and flipped the mirror. Sandy tried to pass and Miguel speeded up until he dropped back.

“Mother was stopped along here for speeding day before yesterday,” Allie said. “They’re patrolling this road since the trouble about the ‘cots last year. Daddy says they’re laying for the Okies from the camp down on the highway.”

“They ought to leave those poor people alone,” Miguel said. “A man came to the house yesterday to ask for work. He was all hungry-looking, sort of. It would make you sick. Becky wouldn’t let him stay around, but she did give him a dollar.”

“Becky is very nice, isn’t she?” Allie said.

“Sure. She’s all right.”

“She’s attractive, too.”

“Yes,” Miguel said guardedly. “For a woman her age.”

“She’s only twenty-four or so.”

“Maybe she just seems old because she’s Luis’s wife,” Miguel said.

“But she is attractive. You think so, don’t you?”

“Hey, are you jealous of her?”

“A little. She makes me feel too young. Do you know what I mean?”

“Yes, I sure do. I feel that way all the time.”

“It’s all right then. If we can feel that way together—”

Miguel heard the rumble seat open as Tom and Florian came up for air. Tom was yelling something at Sandy. Yelling and waving his arms.

Sandy pulled out from behind the Chevy and roared past at full throttle, sending up a rooster-tail of spray.

“That goon is going to get us pinched,” Miguel said. “And that’s all I need. A ticket to take home to my father.” Nevertheless he speeded up to chase Sandy.

Allie asked, “Does your father want to go away again this summer?”

“He’s talking about taking a cabin at Crescent Lake—in Oregon.”

“Oh, no.”

“This time I’m really not going. I’ll talk to him and you’ll see, he’ll let me stay at home. After all, I’m no kid any more. Avery can do the cooking and I’ll look out for the house and the pool.” He glanced at her and added, “You could come over in the afternoon. We’d have the whole place to ourselves. Wouldn’t that be great?”

“What a perfect dream,” Allie said.

“I’ll manage it someway. Becky and Luis can go with him and I’ll stick around good old Los Altos with my girl.”

Allie rubbed her cheek against his shoulder contentedly. “I’m glad I’m your girl,” she said.

Ahead of them, Miguel could see the lights of traffic on El Camino and the sign of the Associated service station on the corner. Sandy wasn’t slowing down a bit. Miguel blew the horn at him and his arm appeared momentarily to make a derogatory sign, and then vanished in the car.

Miguel saw the truck seconds before Sandy did. It was pulling out of the Okie camp and it was piled high with household goods. Miguel could make out a straight-backed chair high on the load. The truck was silhouetted against the highway lights. Its headlamps were yellow-dim and nearly useless.

Miguel saw the Merc’s stoplight flare red. The car swung wide to avoid the front of the truck. But it was traveling too fast for control on the wet road and skidded, spinning broadside down the road toward the highway intersection.

“Oh, God,” Miguel breathed. Allie sat up quickly, trying to see through the smearing of the windshield wipers.

The Mercury spun completely around and struck the steel post of the arterial stop sign. A door flew open and something fell out onto the road. Two cars almost collided with the Merc as it skidded out into the center of the three-lane highway. A third car nosedived as the driver jammed on the brakes in a long slide that ended as the car struck the Mercury broadside and rolled it over on its side.

There was a dull thump, like the sound of a heavy sheet of canvas suddenly pulled taut, and the Merc burst into flames.

The rest of it was nightmarish, disconnected, shocking.

The driver of the other car was out on the highway now, waving his arms at the oncoming traffic. Instantly, there was a jam of cars and lights shining on the wet road.

And in the center, the Mercury burning.

The Chevrolet skidded to a halt beside the bent post of the stop sign. Miguel flung open his door and jumped out. Tom was right behind him. Miguel could hear Florian screaming with terror.

Something was moving in the blaze. It appeared to crawl through the shattered windshield, writhed through a pool of burning gasoline and staggered to its feet, wreathed in fire.

A shrill, woman-like shriek came continuously out of a blazing knot that might have been a human head. As the thing ran toward people who had pressed forward to see, they tumbled back in terror. The screaming rose higher and higher until it pierced the brain.

Tom covered his face with his hands.

The flaming figure ran crazily in circles, waving arms that were charred black with great red cracks in them. The fire hissed on the oil-wet asphalt.

Suddenly the torch collapsed. It seemed to melt into the pavement. The mouth became a red hole in a burnt eyeless mask, it pressed against the road, working slowly. The screaming died to a liquid mumbling that sank lower and lower and finally stopped.

Miguel turned around and hung onto the side of the car for support. He wanted to vomit, but he couldn’t. There was a constriction in his throat that threatened to gag him. People were pressing close to the smoldering bundle on the highway. They gathered around with a ghoulish murmuring. More cars were stopping on the highway, and some along San Antonio behind the Chevrolet. The cars were like glare-eyed flies disgorging maggots. Miguel heard a girl call excitedly, “There was somebody in that car! He burned up! Hurry up!” There was a solid all of people between Miguel and Tom and what was left of Sandy. Tom was sitting on the wet road, his back against the rear wheel of the car. He was being sick.

Miguel looked around for Allie. She was standing by the open door with her arms around Florian, who was having hysterics.

Miguel shook Tom’s shoulder. “Midge,” he said hoarsely.

Tom gazed blankly at him.

“Midge,” Miguel said again. “I saw the door fly open. Something fell out. I think it was Midge.”

Someone yelled, “Come on! It just happened!” Miguel saw men running toward the still-burning car.

“Tom,” he said. “Get up. We have to find Midge.” His voice sounded gravelly, as though he had been screaming for hours.

Tom lurched to his feet and followed him around the car. They began to search the deep grass along the side of the road. More cars were stacking up, more people were appearing with that awful blood-hunger on their faces.

Miguel began to call. His throat was so raw it hurt to breathe. “Midge!”

A man in a sweat shirt shoved him out of the way and said, “Watch where you’re going, buddy.”

Miguel heard a sound like a kitten mewing. It was a thin, hurt sound. Midge lay in the grass twenty feet from the road. Her cheeks were in ribbons.

“God,” Tom whispered. “She must have landed on the road with her face.”

Miguel cradled her head in his lap and started calling for a doctor. People rushed by, unheeding. Allie came pushing ’ through the crowd and found them in the dark, huddled in the wet grass. Miguel was screaming curses at the people running past.

Everything began to run together for Miguel. It was like a dark water color held under a faucet. He remembered Tom running off toward the keening sound of the siren, and he remembered Allie sitting in the grass next to him, holding on to him and crying softly. There was the bubbling sound of Midge’s hurt breathing and the smell of burned meat in the air.

He remembered answering endless questions for a highway patrolman who wanted to give him a citation for driving at night with a restricted drivers license. It seemed absurd and unimportant, somehow. There was a nerve-shattering drive to the hospital behind the agonizingly slow ambulance, and a long wait in the astringent-smelling cement-floored waiting room of the emergency ward and then a doctor telling them that Midge’s cheekbones were fractured, and her jaw, too, and her teeth were smashed and imbedded in her palate. And another doctor telling them Sandy was dead, that he had died not on the highway, but in the ambulance.

The hospital tried to notify Sandy’s parents, but no one was at home. Mrs. Kimball appeared with her dazed-looking husband and they disappeared into Midge’s room without talking to anyone but the doctors.

Florian was still whimpering and pleading with Tom to take her home. And Allie sitting very still with her hand, icy cold, in Miguel’s.

At ten-thirty, Tom said, “Let’s take Floss home. We can’t do anything here.”

They drove to Florian’s house in a thick silence. Tom didn’t linger at the door. He climbed into the front seat with Miguel and Allie. Miguel turned up Seale to Alma Street and started back toward Los Altos.

“God,” Tom said hollowly. “It happened so quick. I didn’t know it could happen so quick.”

Miguel couldn’t talk. He drove slowly along Alma, where the road ran straight through open fields with the Southern Pacific tracks alongside. He could hear the wheels hissing on the wet pavement. He could hear the motor running. In the far-off distance he could hear a train whistle, mournful in the night. All things Sandy would never hear again. There was no one called Sandy Johnson any more. He was gone. Erased. Miguel felt chilled.

“What’s his mother going to say?” Tom asked. “Jesus, what are we going to tell her?” He seemed unable to cease his monologue. He seemed to need to talk even though neither Allie nor

Miguel answered him. “Old Sand. God, Spick, remember the times we all had at the river? The way old Sandy always had to borrow dough? Why did it have to happen to old Sand?” He covered his face with his hands again and cried softly. It didn’t seem wrong, somehow, for Tom to cry for Sandy. Miguel wished he could cry, too.

They drove quietly in the Wylies’ driveway. There were no lights on in the house except the nightlamp in Allie’s room and the porch light.

“Are you going to wake them up and tell them, Allie?” Tom asked.

Allie shook her head.

“Time enough in the morning,” Miguel said. “Everyone will know then.” In the morning he would go to Raoul and tell him the whole story and Raoul would tell him what, if anything, needed to be done. But tonight, right now, he just wanted to be alone with Allie. He didn’t want to leave her.

Tom stood on the lawn disconsolately and said, “I’ll see you at school tomorrow, then, Spick.”

Miguel walked to his car with him. Tom took hold of his shoulders and said huskily, “I’m glad it wasn’t you, Mike.”

Miguel’s eyes felt hot and wet. He squeezed Tom’s arm and walked away quickly.

Tom let Horace Greeley roll down the drive and out onto the road before he started the engine so that the noise wouldn’t wake Mr. and Mrs. Wylie. Miguel and Allie heard the Ford start up softly and rumble away down the canyon.

Miguel looked up and said, “The stars are out. It’s stopped raining.”

Allie’s voice was low and tremulous. “Don’t go yet,” she said.

“All right.”

He put his arm around her waist and they walked back to the porch. Around the side of the house they found the big wicker davenport. It creaked softly under their weight.

“You know what Tom said to me?” Miguel asked quietly.

“Yes. I heard him.”

Miguel lay back and closed his eyes. His muscles were twitching with fatigue. He drew Allie to him so that her head rested on his shoulder.

“But it could have been you,” Allie said. “It could have been you and me instead of Sandy and Midge.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to wake your folks?”

“Oh, no—no—”

Miguel’s hand found her cheek and stroked it. He was thinking of the way Midge had looked and the things the doctor said about her being disfigured. He suddenly felt that he wanted to shield Allie from everything, he wished he could put himself between her and everything that could ever threaten her. There was a thickness in his throat and his hand trembled.

“It could have been us,” Allie said again. “Oh, dear God—” Miguel held her tighter against him. His hand was at her throat, his fingertips touching the deep cleft between her breasts. He slipped his hand inside her dress and cradled her bosom. He could hear the water dripping from the eaves of the house into the soft earth of the flower beds.

“Allie, I love you so much.”

She touched his face, exploring it with her hand in the darkness. “Will it be like this always?”

“To the end of my life, Allie.”

“Don’t say that—”

“Allie, Allie, it wasn’t us. It didn’t happen to us.”

“But it could, Mike. It could. It frightens me so to think of losing you. It would be like losing a part of myself—I’d want to die too.”

Miguel could feel his pulse, heavy and fast, in his temples. He couldn’t stop thinking of that burning, screaming manikin. It was as though his own flesh were being seared. He twisted around so that Allie’s face looked up at him, cool and white in the dark. His arms went around her demandingly and his lips pressed on hers. When he stopped kissing her, he heard her say, “Don’t stop. Don’t stop—I don’t want you to stop.”

“Allie, I haven’t anything—”

“I don’t care.” Her voice in his ear was warm and husky with tenderness.

“Your mother and dad—”

“They’re asleep. They won’t hear.”

The satin smoothness of her skin—the intimate courage of her searching hands. It will last forever, Miguel thought, lost in wonder.

On the weekend of the Hearst Regatta that year, Raoul gave a yachting party on the Nereid.

Miguel and Tom had been planning to drive to Tahoe to see Allie and Florian—the whole crowd, Billy Alberg, Guth Guthrie, everyone from Roslyn, was going up to raise cain at Cal-Neva, but Raoul had insisted that Miguel stay in the Bay area and come along on the Nereid and so Miguel had to change his plans and Tom decided to stay with him.

“I’ll drag along and pull my old man and old lady out of the drink when they get a skinful of your dad’s Scotch,” he said with extravagant casualness. “I can see Floss the Hoss any time.”

Tom’s prediction had erred only in detail. By four-thirty, with the sun sinking behind the Golden Gate and the water ruffled into a sharp chop by the evening onshore wind, Tom and Miguel and Morgan, the crewman, were the only sober souls on board.

The Eubankses, the Guthries, Becky and Luis, Raoul, and Billie Stapp—a large, strident and full-bodied blonde who had recently shed her husband in Reno—were all jammed into the tiny, teak-paneled salon under the foredeck, trying to dance on the small, pitching floor.

Mrs. Stapp had fallen into the water earlier in the day as the Nereid cruised off Belvedere Island, and Tom had had to swim out after her to prevent her striking out for the distant shore in a mood of drunken gaiety. She had peeled off—and lost—her dress while thrashing about in the bay, and Raoul had dragged her aboard over the fantail in her slip and panties, her nipples showing through the wet transparency of the silk and the dark triangle of her pubis proclaiming for all to see that she was no natural blonde.

Becky had sulked for an hour about Billie Stapp, sitting alone in the bow with a very tall highball and threatening to climb into the trailing dinghy if Luis came near her. However, since it was very nearly impossible to maintain aloofness for very long on a fifty-foot cruiser carrying ten people, Becky had been drawn back into the vortex of the party when her highball was gone.

Music blared from the phonograph in the salon. Whoooooo stole my heart awaaaay, whoooooo makes me dream all daaay—Becky’s records. She and Raoul both liked what she called “oldies.”

The dancers laughed and shouted, swaying and sweating in the small enclosure. Luis was presiding at the bar, mixing drinks with an intoxicated lack of precision always erring on the side of generosity.

Oliver Eubanks was doing a Bunny Hug with Becky. His face was red and moist. He was saying something about a leave in Paris with buddies from the old 194th Aero.

Tom, sitting next to Miguel in the bridge, overheard his father and said sarcastically, “Get a load of Lincoln Beechy in there. You’d think he invented the airplane.”

The course was set for the lee side of Yerba Buena Island, where the Bay Bridge’s cantilever span arched down toward the tidelands of the east bay. Around the tip of the island could be seen the barges and pile drivers that were working night and day to complete the fill job of creating an artificial peninsula for the World’s Fair that was to open next year.

Miguel sat in the navigators chair, idly playing with the dial of the ship-to-shore radio. He wore his yachting cap pushed back on his head and his eyes were narrowed against the western light of the sunset.

Miguel was conscious these days of changes in himself. He felt that Allie had been largely responsible. He wasn’t an innocent any more. He and Allie had left that stage behind. He guessed what they were doing was wrong. But it didn’t seem wrong. It gave him the feeling that no matter where Allie might be, apart from him, they were linked together. He thought of her now. She would probably be sitting on the boat landing of the Wylies’ place at Tahoe with Florian and maybe some of the fellows from Roslyn. He didn’t feel jealous. Allie was his. He had established possession and it didn’t matter what the wolves tried. It wouldn’t get them anything.

Miguel gazed through the raked windscreen of the bridge at the sun that was settling, like an oblated blood orange, behind the bulge of the sea beyond the Golden Gate. He could see his own reflection in the glass darkly. He was growing thinner and more angular. The almost oriental slant of his eyes seemed more pronounced. Allie said she liked his eyes. She said, too, that he was growing to look like his father, and while this pleased him, it also piqued his sense of individuality. He would rather not look like anyone but himself.

Becky had changed the record. Now it was something more contemporary and sensually slow. You’d be so easy to love—

“Mush,” Tom said. “Let’s go out on deck.”

“Watch it out there,” Morgan cautioned. “It might get a little rough when we come about again.”

Tom and Miguel went out onto the foredeck. The cruiser was moving smartly through the choppy waves and spray tingled on their faces. Tom leaned against a stanchion and said, “That old Stapp babe is a kick.”

“I thought she was going to drown you over by Belvedere,” Miguel said.

Tom smiled and clucked. “Boy, did I ever grab a good feel of her.”

“Where?”

“Where do you think? She didn’t object, either. Brother, what buzzooms. Yipe.”

Miguel regarded Tom half-enviously, half-doubtfully. Probably Tom was telling the truth. If it had been he, he didn’t think he would have the courage to get fresh with Billie Stapp. But then, Tom was a lot different.

“Tell me something, Spick.”

“Sure, if I can.”

“Have you gone the limit with Allie Wylie?”

Miguel was caught off balance and hesitated before answering, “No, of course not.”

“Bull. You can tell your old Uncle Tom.”

But he couldn’t. He couldn’t tell anyone. It was something just between Allie and himself. Something, well, sacred.

Tom shrugged. “Okay, okay. Just be careful, for chrissake.” He glanced at the bridge and listened to the noise from below. Then he turned his back to the wind and said, “Here, have a weed.”

They lit cigarettes and smoked, shielding the coals against the wind with their palms.

“We ought to get looped sometime,” Tom said. “You ever been?”

“No. Buzzed on beer is all.”

Tom flipped his cigarette in a long arc along the wind and watched it fall into the darkening water. Miguel buttoned the collar of his peacoat. It was turning cold with the sun gone.

“We ought to get ourselves a bottle and try it,” Tom said. “They sure get a bang out of it.” He jabbed a thumb toward the deck.

Miguel wondered if Tom really minded the way Oliver and Ella were, always partying around and drinking. Tom never said. Still, you wouldn’t think a fellow would like having everybody always making passes and cracks about his mother the way people did about Ella. Not that some of the stuff wasn’t true. Miguel could still remember that day he saw her with Billy Alberg’s father. But she was Tom’s mother and Tom must love her and respect her even if he did kid around a lot and call her Ella and the old lady.

It was odd, he thought, that he couldn’t adjust to the ways of the older people the way Tom, for instance, could. Tom, right now, was being tolerant about the messy party that had been going on all day, in spite of the fact that all either of them could do was sit and watch. Miguel had been restless all day, wishing he could be somewhere with Allie. It seemed to him that Raoul pushed him toward manhood with one hand, giving him the car, letting him smoke a little and probably drink, too, if he wanted to ask permission; yet with the other hand he held him back, close to a restrictive family life that demanded first call on his time and loyalty. It created a peculiar sort of conflict where none ordinarily would exist.

The eastern sky was heavy with evening; the first stars were appearing.

“Spick, can I tell you something?”

Miguel looked at Tom sitting hunched against the stanchion. He had the cellophane wrapping from the cigarette package in his hands and he was twisting it into a tight roll.

‘Sure,” Miguel said. “What’s on your mind, Uncle?”

“I think old Floss and I are about through.”

It surprised Miguel that Tom should worry about something like that. He had never given any indication that Florian was very important to him.

“There’s some bastard from Montezuma she’s been going out with. He’s got a Buick Century.”

Tom sounded so unhappy about it that Miguel was moved to sympathy. “It’s probably just a lot of talk,” he said.

Tom shook his head. “Nope. I came down to Paly last weekend and just sat out in front of her place. Sure enough, this guy shows up in his yellow Buick. I guess we aren’t going steady any more.” He looked up at Miguel defensively. “And I know why, too.”

Miguel waited.

“Because I go to Lowell now instead of Roslyn. And because Horace Greeley is an old crock…

“That’s silly,” Miguel said, knowing very well that it wasn’t silly at all and that reasons like that would seem very good reasons to a girl like Florian O’Connor.

“There’s something else, too,” Tom said in a voice almost too low to be heard over the sound of the wind and the water. “She heard stuff. So did her mother.” He looked away. “About Ella.” Miguel breathed slowly. He felt stiff and awkward. He wished he could think of something to say.

“That’s one of the reasons I didn’t want to go up to Tahoe this weekend,” Tom said. He threw the twisted cellophane into the bay and looked helplessly at Miguel. “What the hell is a guy supposed to do, Spick? Jesus—”

Though it cost him something to speak of it, Miguel felt he had to say something that would help Tom, so he said, “People talk a lot, Tom. People used to say things about my mother, too.” Tom’s voice sounded thick. “Not the same kind of things, Spick. I remember your mother. Nobody ever—nobody ever called her a—a roundheels.” He stood up and leaned on the railing, watching the water rush past. Miguel got to his feet and stood beside him. “I get so goddam mad I feel like blubbering. God—old Flossie talking like that. And after she let me get in her pants, too. That’s what hurts. Some babe lets you do anything you want to her and then talks about a guy’s mother. Damned old whore.”

“Did she say anything really? I mean right out?”

“I think Alberg told her some stories. You know what a slimy little bastard he can be when he wants. It seems Lillian is taking off for the islands to be a Christian Science Reader in a church over there and old man Alberg isn’t going. And they’re sending Bill down to Cate School. He’s sore about it and he takes it out on me.”

Miguel thought he understood what had happened now. Billy must have found out about Martin and Ella. Probably Lillian had wormed the information out of Martin in that way she had and Billy found out, too. It was all ancient history, but that wouldn’t matter to Lillian Alberg. It was Error, or Sin, or something. For the first time Miguel felt a bit of sympathy for poor old Martin.

He put his hand on Tom’s shoulder and they stood in silence. After a time, Miguel said, “Let’s go in. I could use a Coke. How about you?”

Tom blew his nose noisily and said, “Go ahead. I’ll be right in.”

Miguel turned and walked down the catwalk to the bridge. The noise of the party was like a blast of sound as he opened the door. The lights of the Key System jetty pointed a brilliant finger into the bay. Morgan turned as he entered and asked him to switch on the running lights. Below, in the salon, Miguel could hear Mel Guthrie telling someone a joke. He had just delivered the tag line and Raoul’s laughter was blended with Billie Stapp’s shrill whinny. He heard her say in a metallic voice, “Ooooh, Raoul honey, your hands are like ice” Luis dropped a glass into the stainless steel sink in the galley and muttered an audible curse. The phonograph ground on. Miguel stole a glance at Morgan. The crewman’s face was imperturbable. He had, Miguel guessed, plenty of experience with these yachting parties.

Miguel sighed and looked through the windscreen at the ominous shape of Alcatraz Island abeam of them. It loomed starkly out of the black water, the rocks along the shore breaking the swells into a white froth under the glare of floodlights. He had an unexplainable impulse to take the wheel from Morgan and see how close he could run the Nereid before the jagged shoals ripped the bottom out of her.

He shivered in his heavy coat, even though the bridge was warm and sheltered from the wind.

He went down the ladder into the galley. Luis was still mixing drinks. His face was flushed and his speech thick. He moved aside as Miguel poured himself a Coke.

“How much longer are we staying out, Luis?” Miguel asked. He wanted to go back to the yacht basin so he could slip away and call Allie.

Luis said, “Don’t you know you’re aboard the Flying Dutchman, young brother?” Then he laughed and walked into the salon where Raoul was dancing with Becky.

Ella had vanished into the tiny head in the very V of the bow. Oliver was giggling and saying to Nadine Guthrie, “If we hit a rock, you know where Ella will get it, don’t you?” Nadine said, “Oh, you filthy thing, you.”

Miguel went back into the bridge. Tom had come in.

Raoul appeared in the hatchway and said, “Make for Paradise Cove, Morgan. We’ll go ashore there and have dinner at Mario’s.”

“Yes, sir.” Morgan swung the wheel and took up a course for the Marin County shore. Miguel wondered if he were relieved at having somewhere to go instead of this endless cruising they had been doing all afternoon. Luis was right, he thought. It did seem a little like being on the Flying Dutchman.

Miguel looked down at his fathers tall figure standing on the ladder. The hawklike face was growing heavier and there was a certain thickness around the chest. This was because of his heart trouble, Dr. Winthrop said. Miguel wondered about some of the things Raoul did, and about how good or bad they were for his heart condition, but his father was the sort who forgot completely about ill health once an attack was over. Raoul must know best, Miguel had decided.

“Enjoying yourself, boys?” Raoul asked. His only concession to the amount of liquor he had consumed during the afternoon was a slight huskiness of speech and the heavy-lidded set of his eyes.

“We re doing great,” Tom said. “Just great, Mr. Rinehart.”

“Sure, Dad,” Miguel said.

Raoul reached up and squeezed his shoulder. “You’re my hijito” he said.

Miguel squirmed slightly. He was never at ease with Raoul when Raoul was drinking. Alcohol stimulated a sentimentality Miguel found suffocating. Often Raoul would take to talking about Maria, and at his insistence, Luis would play his guitar and sing all the old Mexican ballads Maria had loved so—“Borrachita,” “Las Mananitas,” “Quatro Milpas,” and Raoul’s eyes would fill with tears and he would talk about Maria as a young woman. His Spanish would become slurred and almost unintelligible and there would eventually come a moment when his head would sink forward on his chest and he would sighingly mumble that he would soon be with Maria. These scenes both frightened and repelled Miguel.

The forward hatch opened and Billie Stapp appeared like a phoenix on the forward deck. She was reeling, but she managed to scramble past the pilot house on the narrow outside catwalk and stagger on into the cockpit on the fantail.

Oliver Eubanks came up the ladder into the bridge. He walked unsteadily over to Tom and tousled his hair. “How’s my all-American?”

“I’m great, Ollie,” Tom said quickly. “How are you?”

Oliver waved a finger in front of his face and said, “Not so good right this second, old sport. Not so good. I need a little air before we go ashore.” Oliver always called people old sport, or buddy, or pal. Anything but their name. It was as though he couldn’t remember what their names were, even Tom’s, Miguel thought.

“Need any help, Dad?” Tom asked.

“Not a bit. Just need a little air. Think I’ll go outside a bit.”

“Be careful, Oliver,” Raoul said.

Oliver laughed. “You can bet your boots on that, Skipper,” he said, and headed for the rear cockpit.

Raoul said, “I’d better keep everything under control forward. Captain’s duty, isn’t it, hijo? To keep peace in the crew?” He went down the ladder into the salon. Miguel looked over at Tom. He looked back, his face set.

Down in the salon, Becky had thrown herself into Raoul’s arms with cries of, “Dance with me!” Luis was glaring impotently at his father. The phonograph was blaring inanely about the night being delightful, delectable, delicious, delovely.

The door to the head was closed tight.

Nadine said, “Good heavens, is she still in there?”

Raoul said, “It’s just as well. Leave her alone.”

Mel Guthrie said, “Billie in the back with Oliver?”

“Aft,” Becky said drunkenly. “You call it aft on a boat.” Nadine laughed shrilly. “I call it adultery no matter where it happens!”

Tom looked over at Miguel, then back toward the fantail. He shook his head before Miguel could say anything and turned away.

Raoul insisted on ferrying everyone ashore in the dinghy. Morgan rowed the passengers by fours to the dock with the neon sign on it that said: MARIO’S FINE SEA FOODS, THE PRIDE OF PARADISE. Raoul took the last load himself, leaving Morgan in charge of the boat, which was anchored fifty feet from the pier. Miguel and Tom stayed aboard and ate a quiet meal with Morgan.

After dinner, they left Morgan to clean up in the galley and went aft to sit on the fantail and smoke a cigarette.

The night was dark and pleasantly warm in the lee of the shore. They sat and smoked in silence, watching the lights of the other cruisers anchored nearby and listening to the sound of the waves.

Presently, Miguel said, “I’m sorry Tom. You wouldn’t have come along if it hadn’t been for me.”

“What difference does that make? Hell, Spick, they do it all the time. One or the other.” His voice sounded miserable in the darkness. “I guess they just can’t help it. They were like that when they were kids and they never got over it.”

“I’m sorry anyway. You could have been up at Tahoe except for me.”

“I wouldn’t have gone.”

They fell silent, watching the blue shimmer of Mario’s sign on the water. A small sloop, its sails furled, ghosted by on its softly burbling auxiliary. They watched the disembodied red eye of the portside running light glide out into the bay.

“Sometimes I wonder why they stick together,” Tom said.

“You don’t mean you think they should get a divorce?”

“Why not? They always act like they’re having a big time together, but inside they’re just bored with each other, I guess.”

“Divorce isn’t the answer,” Miguel said. He felt impelled, for some reason he didn’t completely understand, to talk to Tom about Maria. It was difficult, yet somehow necessary to him. He needed to be close to someone, and Allie was far away.

“Dad always said it was an accident,” Miguel said finally, ‘“but I just don’t know.” He dropped his cigarette over the side and heard it hiss in the water.

“It must have been rough,” Tom said.

“I don’t think Essie would have gone into the convent if it hadn’t happened. Maybe I’m wrong, I don’t know,” Miguel said. “She had some goofy idea God was punishing her for going to Young Communist meetings with Anson Wilbur. It sounds crazy, but when Anson got killed last year she must have figured she was right as rain and lucky to get away from Raoul and me.”

“Why you? You didn’t have anything to do with it,” Tom protested.

“Golly, Tom. I don’t know. I never did know Essie very well. I wanted to. I really did. But it never worked out. It wasn’t like trying to know a girl like, well, say Allie Wylie. Essie is all sort of dark inside. Do you know what I mean? I’m not being very clear about it, I know. It was like being a man was a sort of crime around Essie.” He thought a minute and then said, “You remember that summer on the river—the time I saw those people—” he stumbled a little and then hurried on “—those people from the Villa?”

Tom laughed shortly and said, “Sure. I remember. Christ, you were green, Spicko.”

“Sure I was. I know. I’ll tell you how green.” He told Tom about the incident of the journal and Esther’s reaction to what he had written. “She acted as though I were, well, infected or something.”

Tom gave a low whistle. “I’ll bet.”

“Well, it’s just one of the things that happened. Maria, and then Essie going into the church. The place is right over that hill. You can almost see it from here. And it might just as well be a million or so miles away or Mars or somewhere. Raoul doesn’t even try to see her any more. She doesn’t want him to.” Miguel kicked at the teak paneling with a sneaker. “So now there’s just me and Dad and Luis. And Becky, of course. That’s why Dad is so funny about letting me go anywhere—like to Tahoe or down to Del Monte.” Miguel realized that he was apologizing for Raoul, trying to explain things to Tom that didn’t really need explaining, but he went on with it. “Dad’s really a terrific guy, Tom.”

“Sure he is,” Tom agreed. “Hell, I remember one time—I guess it was while your mother was still alive—he took us down to Idora Park and let us ride on all the things down there. Remember that?”

“And that time we came back from Sacramento on the Delta Queen?”

Tom laughed. “That was a hell of a lot of fun.”

“He isn’t like other guys’ fathers,” Miguel said, “but that’s because he’s really a foreigner. He was raised differently from most of the people we know. And then Luis and I are about all the family he has left.”

“Sure. It figures.”

They lapsed into silence again. A cool breeze was blowing in from the bay and the Nereid swung slowly about at the end of her anchor line.

“Think Morgan’s got some hot coffee?” Tom asked.

“I guess so.”

“Sit still. I’ll bring you some.”

Miguel lit another cigarette and settled down to wait. He could hear voices on shore and the creak of oars. Presently, through the dim path of light made by Mario’s sign, he saw a dinghy coming slowly toward the boat.

He could hear the oars dipping into the water and the murmur of someone talking in a low voice. He heard the oars being shipped. Whoever it was was letting the dinghy drift.

Tom came back with two cups of coffee. He joined Miguel at the rail and asked, “What’s going on?”

“Someone in a dinghy out there,” Miguel whispered.

“Ours?” Tom whispered back.

Miguel shrugged.

Over the water came the sound of a low, provocative laugh. Miguel swallowed doubtfully. The voice was familiar. Someone said, “No, wait. We mustn’t.”

Miguel drew back from the rail. The voice was Becky’s.

A man muttered something indistinguishable, but Becky’s reply carried clearly across the water. “Wait—oh, no—all right—God, yes, yes—”

Miguel bit his lips and prayed, “Let it be Luis. Please, God, let it be Luis—”

The sounds of lovemaking were unmistakable: the labored breathing, the soft passionate cries from Becky, and through it all, the asinine creaking of the boat in the water.

Miguel wanted to call out and tell them to sheer away; he wanted to warn them that the tide was carrying them close to the Nereid; but he only sat rigidly, holding his coffee cup, knowing he had to know who else was in the boat with Becky.

“Jesus, listen to that!” Tom whispered.

Miguel nudged him into silence.

“They’ll drift right past us and out into the bay,” Tom said. “They’re too drunk and too screw-happy to know what they’re doing, whoever they are. Some goddam boat is liable to run them down.”

Miguel thought coldly: I hope some boat does. If it isn’t Luis in that dinghy, I hope they drown.

But he knew better. He stood up suddenly and called out, “Ahoy the dinghy! You better show a light there!”

The voice that came back to him was like a dash of ice-water in his face. He didn’t even hear what it said so laughingly. Because the voice was Raoul’s.

Miguel dropped to the seat and hung his head. He felt sick. “Becky,” he said through clenched teeth. “Christ, with Becky!”

He felt Tom’s arm around his shoulder. He burned with shame. He wrapped his hands around the railing and squeezed with all of his might, fighting the ache inside.

After a long while, he looked up at Tom and bared his teeth in a grimace that bore little resemblance to a smile. “I guess we’re in the same boat. That’s a pun, Uncle,” he said tightly.

“I’m laughing, Spicko,” Tom said quietly.

“So am I.”

He turned around and looked out over the water. I’ll never forgive you, he thought. Either one of you.

THIRTEEN

He sat in semi-darkness in the rear cabin of the big Douglas. He was looking out the window at the lights of New York which were fading astern. It was nearly midnight. They would arrive in San Francisco about six-thirty in the morning, which was an ungodly time to arrive anywhere. Particularly if you were not sure what it was you planned to do when you did get there.

He wanted to see Dorrie, of course. But he would procrastinate about that because it might well mean seeing Alaine, too. Possibly he would end up by avoiding that contretemps entirely. He could always send the music box to Dorrie if he had to.

The solution was unsatisfactory and he knew it.

He considered seeing Esther. It had been almost three years since he had last gone to the Convent of the Holy Name and asked for Sister Cecilia. He remembered the pale, unfriendly face under the starched white coif. She hadn’t been pleased to see him. He would not be surprised to find that she had done penance for the sin of lack of charity. Charity—was it charity for a sister to greet her brother? Did all family ties come to an end when the gold band was slipped on a nuns finger? He knew so little about religion any more. He had forgotten everything Concha might have taught him.

He thought of his nana’s shining black eyes and the incredibly erect way she carried herself. Such odd fragments of memory persisted. He remembered that Raoul used to say that Concha had the body of an angel and the face of a devil. And it was true, because smallpox had destroyed what looks she might possibly have developed. He could very vaguely remember that when he was still small enough to be carried in her arms, she would give him her breast to suckle when he was fitful or restless. And she had done it so naturally that it had been years before he learned that it was a shameful thing for a boy of five to be suckling on a milkless breast.

She had been one person who had loved him without question, without reservation, and without hope of recompense. A simple woman, sturdy, ignorant, faithful, and in a way a civilized person could never be, selfless. Selfless with a great selfishness, because to be devoted was, for her, to be happy.

He wondered what it would be like now, if he were to bring Concha out of that little village in the Sierra Morena where she was living. It was an insane notion, really. To bring back a symbol of childhood so that you could feel there was one place on earth where you really belonged.

No, Concha was gone for good. There was no reanimating the past. Olinder had suggested that what he was seeking was a kind of fetal peace. He wondered if that were so. Fetal peace and a tragic love. That last was Alaine s particular gibe. If you could call anything Alaine said a gibe. Gibes were cruel and there was no cruelty in Alaine. She had tried hard to be everything he wanted her to be and when she saw that he chose to wall himself away from her, she only wished to be free.

No one could call that unkind, or even ungenerous. On the contrary, it was the most liberal gesture Alaine could make.

It was a scene Miguel had re-created in his mind a hundred times, trying to acquit himself well.

It always came out the same way. The whole is equal to the sum of its parts, no more and no less. There was no miracle of non-Euclidean mathematics that was going to make his behavior decent and understandable. No non-Aristotelian system of logic would prevail here.

He had willfully (what other word was there?) carried on an affair with his best friend’s wife. He had broken it off once only to start it all again more binding than before. He was bound to Nora by ties he could not grasp himself, so how could he expect Alaine to understand that they were important ties?

Alaine could only see that her husband belonged to another woman. Quod erat demonstrandum. And Alaine’s mind worked with a prosaic simplicity and directness that baffled him. Baffled him all the more, because he, himself, couldn’t supply the answers to the supremely uncomplicated questions Alaine asked.

“Why can’t you let me love you? Why can’t you let anyone love you?”

Lovely questions. He recalled taking refuge in a sorry display of temper, pacing about the apartment and saying that all he wanted out of life was for people to leave him the goddam hell alone and let him do what he wanted to do.

And Alaine had finally asked him for a divorce.

He had been spending more and more time in Hollywood with Nora. Much more time, really, than his writing commitments down there required. Alaine knew what held him there and she took it for a time, remembering, perhaps, that they had been happy in Europe and hoping that they might be again. But Alaine wasn’t the sort to take abuse forever and in the end she had told him that she was tired and that she wanted a divorce.

He had not seen her since that day more than two years ago now. He sent money when he could, and small gifts that Dome might like, and occasionally a short note—impersonal as he could make it. She, in turn, wrote when something came up that he should be consulted about. Dorrie’s tonsillectomy, the insurance on the car, the subleasing of the flat on Sacramento Street when she moved to the house in Seacliff. Polite notes, as impersonal as his own. Notes from a woman who had been his wife, who had borne him a child, and who was now making a life without him.

He sighed and turned on the reading lamp, opening the paperback Hemingway. He had always thought A Farewell to Arms was the finest love story ever written. Another of Alaine’s favorites, along with Auden and Brahms.

He couldn’t concentrate on the story. He found himself thinking of Tony Ayula and that ugly scene at the cocktail party. He had made an enemy, that much was sure. Ayula wouldn’t rest until he found a way to pay him back for that punch in the mouth.

Under certain circumstances, though, Ayula would be only a latent danger. If he could mend his fences—and his ways, he added dryly—and hurried down to see Ziegler and above all Nora as soon as they arrived on the Coast, he could still have the Artfilm job. He was sure of it.

The bitter truth was that he needed the work. His money wasn’t going to last forever. It was easy to be an individualist as long as you were solvent. But his solvency dwindled with each traveler’s check he cashed.

AD the lovely agonies, he thought, all the great designs—they came finally to this. Money. The stars in the eyes were shaped like dollar signs. Perhaps I should have written about that.

Once Karl had commented on the fact that bartenders had more security in America than writers. And then he had asked the unanswerable question, “But which contributes more to society, a man who will listen to your troubles or a man who commits his own to paper?”

It was, at the moment, a question Miguel found disturbing. It was one his father might have asked.

He decided to pick up a copy of Kathryn Bellamie’s damned book in Chicago and see if he could struggle through it.

It was a rainy, gray day in the winter of 1952 that Alaine asked Miguel for her freedom. The very sound of the word divorce shook him. He could never hear it without thinking of the night Maria died.

He went to the window and stood there moodily, looking out at Grace Cathedral and the shiny wet streets of San Francisco. He could feel Alaine watching him.

He was thinking that he didn’t like this flat and never had. He remembered the apartment on Telegraph Hill, the walk-up where they had lived during the last years of the war. He hadn’t liked that, either.

I’m cursed with discontent, he thought angrily.

It was all wrong. The money from the new movie job was coming in. Steinmetz liked The Exile almost as well as he had liked the first book. Alaine’s health was good. Dorrie was in nursery school—

And Nora was waiting for him in Malibu. The perfect picture of a modem marriage, he thought with asperity. It was enough to ward off the memory of Raoul’s last days, the late arrival from Europe, the bitter words with Becky.

Only now Alaine, in her simple way, was trying to upset the delicate balance he had achieved.

“You act as though this is the first time in history a man’s been unfaithful,” he said.

Alaine shrugged her shoulders and sat down on the tapestry chair before the dark, cold fireplace. The afternoon light was dull and the wind from the south would bring more rain. “Maybe I’m just not civilized enough.”

“I’d say you’re being positively Noel Cowardish,” he said. “Is it so easy to ask me for a divorce?”

She shook her head. “You know it isn’t.”

“I told you I’d stop seeing Nora.”

“I don’t believe you, Mike. You’ve said it too often.”

When he said nothing and remained staring out of the window at the gray day, she went on.

“I’m not sure it would be the right thing for you, anyway. Maybe—God help me—Nora is right for you, after all.”

He turned and looked at her. “You can be saintly when you try, Allie.”

She turned her face away. “Please, Mike—don’t be cruel. You can cut me to ribbons with your tongue. You know that. I’m not trying to be saintly. I’m being selfish. Completely selfish. You are sucking the life out of me. You’re turning me into something ugly inside. I don’t want it to go on like this. I’ll end up hating you.”

Miguel turned back to the window. “You don’t mention Tom in all this. You’re dying to, aren’t you? Why don’t you go ahead?”

“What happened to Tom wasn’t your fault, Mike.”

“That’s what the Board of Inquiry said.”

“I’m talking about you and me, Mike.”

He saw her suddenly simply as an obstruction. An obstruction between him and some vaguely grasped future with all his problems solved and all his questions answered. Somehow, it didn’t have anything to do with Nora, and the very qualities he had always admired in Alaine were at this moment the most damnable.

“This is what I mean,” she said faintly.

“What do you mean, in the name of heaven?”

“This. This. Can’t you feel it? But of course you can. You shut yourself away from me. You withdraw to some place inside yourself where I can’t follow. It’s what I can’t bear about it, Mike. I wanted to be more than just someone sharing your house and your bed. But I’m not. I’m simply in your way. I’m just one thing more to make you feel dragged down, ashamed, guilty—Oh, I don’t know what, I just don’t know.” Her face was pale and controlled. Only her hands moved, twisting a handkerchief in her lap. “I want a divorce, Mike.”

“No, Allie.”

“But it’s for you, don’t you see that? I’m no good for you any more.”

“No, Alaine. No divorce,” he said harshly.

She stood up and faced him. “Mike, what if there were someone else for me, too? Someone who could—I don’t know—make me happy? That’s an insipid word, isn’t it? No, suppose there were someone I wanted. Would you let me go then?”

He looked at her. “I’d kill the son of a bitch.”

She began to laugh. There was the thinnest thread of hysteria in the sound. “That isn’t being very consistent, is it? I mean for you to come here to me from Nora and say something like that?”

“Is there someone else?”

Alaine shook her head almost regretfully. “No, no—how could there be? I told you a long time ago I was a one-man woman. I’m not in style. I’m a Victorian at heart. But I can’t go on this way, Mike. God help me, I simply can’t.”

He stood mutely watching her. There was nothing he could say. He was torn by a desire to be free and by a terror of being alone. He had always known it would come to this sooner or later, and he had promised himself that he must stop the thing with Nora before it did. But he hadn’t been able to stop. It was almost as though Tom, in some obscene way, had wedded them. What lust has joined let no man put asunder—

Raoul must have known this would happen to me sooner or later, Miguel thought. God, how he must have known! It must have been like looking in a mirror. Absalom, son of David.

Alaine said sorrowfully, “You can’t let anyone love you, Mike. You simply can’t. If they try, you destroy them.”

“Don’t talk nonsense, Allie,” he said in a low voice.

“It isn’t nonsense. I’ve tried so hard, Mike. And you just shut me out. Tom loved you, too—that’s the hurtful thing about it. And you need to be loved. You need it so much. But you just can’t let it happen, can you? Even your father—”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Miguel said heavily.

“I’m so tired, Mike,” Alaine said. “Please.”

“All right. I’ll go.”

She sat down and simply waited. He walked reluctantly to the door. “There’s a place in Malibu I can rent. I’ll send you the address,” he said. “I’ll send someone for my things.” He paused, waiting for her to say something, but she sat silently.

“If you insist on a divorce, I won’t fight you. But—” He had to beg for something and he didn’t know how. He stumbled badly over the words. “I’m asking you to wait. Please wait.”

Her voice was scarcely audible in the gloomy room. “All right,” she said. “Now please go.”

He remembered her drawn face and the darkness of her eyes in shadow. She was dressed in black, he remembered that too. Black for mourning.

He was touched and filled with pity but there was nothing he could do. When you built a barrier, it worked both ways.

FOURTEEN

The forests of Pennsylvania had given way to the farmlands of Ohio and northern Indiana in the darkness below. Miguel could see the occasional flash of lightning north of the airliner s track. Isolated thunderstorms, towering into the high darkness over the Great Lakes. He could see, too, the faint fan of a single automobile’s headlamps far below, crawling through the gelid, starless night. Ahead, glowing amber, were the lights of South Bend, then Gary—with the feathers of flame from steel converters fingering the gloom.

Over the Atlantic he had felt disembodied, as though the airplane carrying him were stationary in limbo, having no relationship to the sea below. But here now, flying over the broad breast of America, the feeling was reversed. It seemed to him that the land reached up to slow the aircraft; as though each cubic foot of soil below demanded attention before relinquishing him to the next.

He was conscious of a strange sense of possession, a feeling of involvement with the colossal earth that lay supine beneath the trembling wings.

He tried to analyze it and found that he could not. The reasons for it lay somewhere beyond the scope of his understanding.

Perhaps, he thought, it was simply because everything that had ever happened to make him the man he was had taken place here—in this land. Alaine was here, and Dorrie, and if that other child had a grave it was surely in this American earth.

He turned away from the window and gazed unseeing at the lights in the cabin ceiling. He was remembering that night with Tom in Paradise Cove. At seventeen the knowledge that his father was having an affair with Becky had been shattering. It needed, again, as with everything else, the perspective of years to expand the point of view from that tiny nucleus to include the outermost electron rings of human activity.

That was something Alaine always tried to tell him, and even knowing she was right, he had always resisted it. He would counter with the argument that the universe was always egocentric and the things that happened to you were the only ones with any reality.

The terminal building at Chicago was huge and dirty, the long lanai-like passageway around the L-shaped structure was littered with refuse. It was hot, with a gusty wind blowing off the lake. At this hour of the morning, there was little activity. A few servicemen dozed on wooden benches and here and there a late-traveling businessman hurried toward the boarding gates. Most of the counters were closed and Miguel had to walk the long trek to the restaurant to find a newsstand. He bought a copy of the Bellamie book, noting the dark young Adonis in Spanish morion the artist had depicted on the jacket and the bosomy Irish girl with her dress falling off one shoulder. They looked very like Clift and Nora.

Miguel put the book in his pocket and walked back to the gate where Continental Airlines Flight 666 was refueling.

The big Douglas DC-6 gleamed silver in the floodlights. It looked awkward and earthbound with the crewmen clustered around it, pumping fuel from yellow-painted tank trucks into the broad wings. The running lights went on and off with patient monotony as dollies loaded the baggage of the deplaning Chicago passengers.

Six sixty-six was carrying a light load to San Francisco, it seemed. Miguel saw only a dozen or so people waiting sleepily to reboard the airplane.

He watched the new crew go aboard—the two stewardesses, the flight engineer and the two pilots with their flight bags. Airlines were a little like the olive canners, he thought. The smallest olive you could buy was something called a Large De Luxe, and in the same frame of mind, the airlines called their pilot a captain and the co-pilot a first officer. Semantic snobbishness with a commercial twist. People felt better about flying with a captain than they did about flying with a mere pilot. The word pilot itself was a lower-case word, faintly redolent of hayfields and Jennies and helmet-and-goggled hell-raisers—while captain was an okay, four-stripe word with scrambled eggs on its cap.

Miguel mused that he had flown in the left-hand seat for almost three years and had never been anything but a plain fly boy pilot with a fifty-mission crush to his Bancroft Flighter. He remembered that toward the end of the Middle War they had started calling pilots airplane commanders. But co-pilots had never been anything but co-pilots.

It had remained for the United States Air Force to accomplish what the United States Army Air Corps had never been able to do: make aviation respectable, with blue uniforms and silver lightning bolts and clouds and grommets in garrison caps. Nothing can stop the Army Air Corps—He remembered learning that song while standing at attention in a wastebasket with an upperclassman bellowing commands in his face. He wondered how they had fit the new independent Air Force’s name into the song. It didn’t scan. Possibly they had just changed the song. It didn’t seem to go with B-52s and thermonuclear devices, somehow.

The gate attendant unlatched his chain and the passengers filed aboard dispiritedly. Miguel glanced at his watch. Two o’clock. The wind blew in gusts, whirling newspapers and bits of refuse high into the air. It carried the far-off sound of thunder.

When he was in his seat again, it occurred to Miguel that the next time he left this cabin, it would be in San Francisco. There was an almost fearful excitement in his chest, and a hunger to see once more the great inshore basin of the bay, the rolling foothills rising to the ridge of the Coast Range, and fog like a white blanket rolling in through the Golden Gate with the vermilion towers of the great bridge rising out of the mist.

The Douglas taxied out to the end of the strip and the pilots began their run-up. Miguel followed them through mentally.

Starboard inboard engine, right magneto, left magneto, both. Propeller to flat pitch, coarse pitch, and back to flat for take-off. Manifold pressure, oil pressure and temperature, fuel pressure, cylinder head temperature.

Cowl flaps open. Checked and ready.

Four times, the run-up—with the airplane vibrating and seemingly eager for flight. And then the undulating roll to square away with the runway and the feeling of acceleration, with the runway lights ticking by faster and faster until at last the wings develop enough lift to raise tons of steel and dural and bone and flesh into the murky darkness.

There was beauty in flight, Miguel thought. He had tried to capture it on paper with The Canceled Skies. He felt that he had done it, too. It had been a good book, with the feeling of flight to it.

He took the Bellamie from his pocket with some reluctance. He had no right to criticize Mrs. Bellamie for what she wrote or how, he knew. It was simply that he regretted with all his heart having to read it. In his present state of mind, though, it might be just the thing he needed. He opened the book to Chapter One.

The stewardesses were checking tickets, one girl holding the manifest and the other taking the tickets and greeting the passengers with a professional smile.

Miguel had started page 3 of The Green Hills of Home when they reached him.

He had given his ticket to the stewardesses out of New York and this girl was simply checking him, presumably, he thought to make sure he hadn’t wandered out of the airplane while it was in flight. He remembered that the gatekeeper always came aboard an airliner just before take-off and said something like, “You got thirty-two of ‘em?” And the stewardess would count the names on the manifest and sometimes even count heads in the cabin and reply, “That’s right. Thirty-two.” Or forty or forty-one, however many persons she had on board. It always made Miguel feel a little like part of a shipment of livestock.

Now, the girl, trim in a pale gray uniform with wings on the tilted cap and over her breast, said, “Happy to have you with us, Mr. Rinehart.”

That was another gambit. If he replied that he was happy to be with her, he felt that he was overvaluing a purely professional greeting. If he said nothing, he felt sure he would be accounted surly and probably be served cold coffee.

He nodded at the girls and returned to his book. They completed their trip through the rear compartment and returned to the buffet. The top lights in the cabin went out.

Miguel reached page 10 of Kathryn Bellamie’s book and stopped. He couldn’t for the life of him remember what he had read. It was no use. He dropped the book on the empty seat beside him and took up the Hemingway again.

They had been in the air over an hour. It was three o’clock and the darkness outside was stygian. They must be flying through a high stratus deck, he thought. Even the position light was invisible, and on the Douglas, the exhaust flames could not be seen from a level above the wing.

He closed the book and sat looking outside at nothing, trying to think of nothing, too.

Someone sat down beside him and he looked around. It was one of the stewardesses.

“Mind if I sit here?”

“Please do,” he said, noting that she already had.

She was brunette, with short hair attractively arranged under the flight cap.

“I know who you are,” she said, smiling at him. This was not, he noticed, the same smile with which she had greeted him earlier.

“I read your book, The Canceled Skies,” she said.

Miguel restrained an impulse to frown. Conversation beginning like this always made him uncomfortable. She was waiting for him to ask her if she liked it, and she would say yes whether she had or not, and then he would be left holding the ball and babbling about how happy he was that she had liked it.

“You are the Miguel Rinehart, aren’t you?” she asked. “There couldn’t be two people with a name like that.”

He smiled in spite of himself. “Yes, I’m the right one.”

“Thank heaven,” she said and leaned her head back against the seat cushion. She took the cap off and ran a hand through her hair. He noticed that she kept watching the other passengers—most of whom were asleep. “I thought maybe I’d goofed,” she said. “I don’t very often, you know.”

There was a vigor and youthfulness to the way she talked that was intriguing. She looked about twenty-six or seven.

She stretched her legs out and settled more comfortably in the seat. “This is one of the advantages of being the A Girl,” she said. She reached under her and handed him the Bellamie book. He put it in the pocket in the back of the seat ahead of him with the airline folders and maps.

“The A Girl?” he asked.

Her brown eyes studied his face so that he had the impression that what she said and what she was thinking were completely unrelated.

“That’s right,” she said. “The senior stewardess.”

“It follows then,” Miguel said, half-smiling, “that there is also a B girl on this airplane.”

She smiled back at him as though she were pleased with him for making a proper answer. “Marian Keane. She takes the front cabin.”

“I see.”

Her shoulder brushed his imperceptibly. “But you really aren’t interested.” She laughed and added, “You don’t have to answer that. It’s schlock.”

“Schlock,” Miguel said. “I guess I’ve been away too long. And I’m said in certain circles to have an ear for language.”

“Part of the patter. You know. The conversation people make.”

He nodded and took out a package of cigarettes. She refused when he offered her one, but she said, “I’ll take a drag on yours if you don’t mind germs.”

Miguel had a momentary impression of sitting next to a dynamo. The girl was attractive and immensely assured. He found that assurance both stimulating and appealing.

“Have you been out of the country?” the girl asked.

“Yes. Does it show?”

“You get so you can tell.”

“My suit must be wrinkled.”

“No, seriously. You learn a lot about people in this job. You can tell things.” She looked directly at him. “But you’re the first author I’ve met.” She paused. “I’m cheating a little,” she said. “I read about you in the paper.”

Miguel frowned. “In what paper?”

“One of the Chicago papers. The Tribune, I think.” She regarded him provocatively. “It said you were on your way to the coast to write a script for your fiancee’s new picture.” She tapped the bulge of Mrs. Bellamie’s book where it nested among the maps and throwaways. “The Green Hills of Home.”

Miguel bit his lip and looked out the window. Tony Ayula hadn’t waited long to sink the harpoon into him. Nora must have convinced Ziegler that Alaine would cause no trouble and Tony had released the story to the papers. “That will teach me to go belting people,” he said in a low voice.

“What?”

“I said, my wife will be delighted to hear it.”

“Oh, a wife?”

“Yes, indeed. A wife.”

“But you’re separated.”

“As a matter of fact, yes. That still doesn’t make that newspaper business any easier on me.”

“You know? I often wondered what Nora Ames was like. I think I admire her.”

Miguel said nothing. He was still thinking about Alaine. “When a woman sees something she wants, she should go after it.”

“Many women do,” Miguel said. He wished suddenly that the girl would leave him alone. He reached up and turned out the light.

“You don’t have to worry,” the girl said. “The story was on the back pages. In the theater section.”

“That’s a blessing,” Miguel said. He pressed his fingers against his cheekbones.

The girl said, “Headache?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

“Let me get you some dramamine.”

“Don’t trouble.”

She stood up, smoothing her skirt. “No trouble at all. Part of Continentals service.” Leaning over him, she said in a low, laughing voice, “Marian and I have the highest per capita dramamine consumption rate of any stew-team in the western division. Marian eats the stuff.”

“Motion sickness? In a stewardess?”

The girl shook her head deliberately. “In a way. She has an involuntary orgasm every time we miss a landing attempt.”

In spite of himself, Miguel laughed.

“There, you see? You’re feeling better already.”

“I was thinking of your friend. Winter flying must be a joy to her.”

“Three or four a trip,” she said gaily.

“That’s par for the course.”

She paused and looked at him, her head held to one side, her eyes mocking. “Yes,” she said. “For a junior stew.”

She turned away and walked to the buffet, conscious that she was being watched. The uniform skirt was snug across her well-shaped buttocks and her legs were good. Her American feet, not small, were encased in soft leather Capezios.

She returned with the dramamine and Miguel took it without protest, although it had no effect on him, washing the capsule down with a swallow of water.

She did not sit down again, but she bent so that her hair very nearly brushed his cheek. “May I borrow your book?”

“The Green Hills?”

“Yes. I’ll return it.”

Miguel found himself thinking how pleasant it would be if instead of doing all the things he had promised himself must be done, he could simply spend a few quiet hours with this assured and pretty, nameless girl.

He took the book from the seat pocket and said, “If you’ll have dinner with me in San Francisco.”

The girl smiled. “Well see,” she said. She reached into the shelf overhead and brought down a pillow and blanket. She put the pillow behind Miguel’s head and spread the blanket over him. “You see? We know how to please, don’t we? We go to school to learn it.”

“You didn’t answer me. About dinner.”

“I said we’d see,” she said briskly.

Miguel grimaced at the darkness outside, smarting unduly at the rebuff. “Thanks,” he said. “For the pillow.”

“I’ll bring your book back,” the girl said, and walked away toward the front of the cabin.

Have I offended her someway, Miguel wondered. He turned his face toward the night and pulled the blanket around him. After all, what did it matter?

He closed his eyes, but sleep would not come. He lay half-reclining, drowsy with the darkness and the rumble of engines and thought of Allie Wylie and Sandy and Midge Kimball.

What had become of Midge, he wondered, with her poor smashed face? She had never been a beauty, but what looks she had she lost in the accident. Only her face had been damaged, but she had had to stay in the hospital so long that her body, too, seemed to have wasted when she finally came home.

And when she began to recover, no one knew her. To lose a year that way at sixteen or so was social destruction. Not that it mattered with that demolished face.

Miguel could remember that Allie Wylie had made a point of visiting Midge at least twice a week all the time she was in the hospital. And sometimes Allie would cry when she came home from those visits, because it was obvious from the start that even the plastic surgeons would never be able to make Midge look quite right again.

Poor Sandy, Miguel thought. To end in a nightmare like that. Where had it all gone, he wondered. The youth, the big dreams, the hopes for life? You crossed into middle age, Miguel thought, when you finally understood that you would never again have the courage to risk the losses that came with big dreams.

That night in Paradise Cove, for example, lost him Raoul and the dream of family and family pride. Nothing changed externally, but there was a cancer born that night.

And there was Allie to remember. Another loss.

Someone, it might have been Midge or even Becky—he couldn’t remember now—had sent him a Christmas card in 1951 while he was living in Malibu with Nora. There had been a note on the card saying that Allie Wylie was back in Los Altos. He remembered how his hands shook as he read the offhand, casual lines. He had burned the card, not wanting Nora to read it and ask questions.

He felt the old, familiar ache inside when he thought of her. Not love, it couldn’t be that. He had remembered and forgotten her a thousand times. Well, perhaps never quite forgotten. There was a song that went, “I saw you last night and got that old feeling—” It was like that. There were always songs. Too many songs and all of them reminding you. That one called “Where Or When.” They had taken that one for their own and wasn’t it a crying shame to pick a tune that was destined to become a classic so that you would hear it for the rest of your life?

On a Saturday in late September of 1938, Miguel and Allie went hotel dancing at the Palace to hear Glen Gray and the

Casa Loma Orchestra. Allie wore her red formal, the one she wore to the New Years dance at the country club. It was old, but Miguel asked her to wear it. He remembered that first time he had kissed her breast and he counted it as the beginning. She wore the dress to please him.

Gray played endless choruses of “No Name Jive” and Kenny Sargent, at Miguel’s proud request, sang “Where Or When” and “Just the Way You Look Tonight.” Miguel liked that one because it had a line in it, “—and that laugh that wrinkles your nose touches my foolish heart.” Which was corny, yes, but Allie did wrinkle her nose when she laughed and Miguel was so crazy in love with her that he thought of nothing else.

They had come up to the city alone in the Chevy. Tom was off somewhere with a Redwood City girl from Sequoia High. He had stopped seeing Florian O’Connor. Lawton Higby was with Floss and some fellow from Montezuma School and his date. But Miguel and Aldyth were keeping pretty much to themselves these days. It seemed to be the way Allie wanted it and Miguel didn’t mind.

The couples moved slowly about the floor under the rose-colored lights. The music was terrific—slow enough to dance to, but with a solid beat from the rhythm section and accented with really fine work on the sizzle cymbal—the big Chinese job pierced with loose rivets to make a steady hissing note when tickled with the wire brushes.

Miguel held Allie in his arms and danced with his eyes half-closed. There had been a change in Allie since that first night. She didn’t seem such a child any more. He was thinking of something, and he said, “Somebody told me they were going to subdivide Frenchman’s Tor.”

“Oh, no, Mike.”

“That’s what I heard.”

“Remember how we used to go up there all the time when we were kids?” Allie said softly.

“You with dirty knees and stickers in your socks.”

She moved her hand up on his back and held him as they danced. “Mike—”

“Umm?”

“Is it still the same way with you?”

He pressed his lips against her forehead. “More,” he said. “Because—” She hesitated and then went on. “Because I really belong to you now?”

“If there has to be a reason, I guess that’s it.”

Lawt Higby danced by with Florian and nudged Miguel. “Let’s watch that jowl-to-jowl stuff, guy. This a respectable joint.”

Things like that didn’t seem so amusing when they came from Lawt instead of Tom. They hadn’t seen too much of Tom since he and Floss had broken up. Miguel still held it against her. “Big joke,” he said to Allie. “Joke over.”

“I guess everybody talks about us,” Allie said quietly.

“To hell with them.”

“Mike—tell me you love me. Please.”

“Allie,” he said reproachfully. “You know I do.”

She wouldn’t look at him. Her forehead was on his shoulder and her face pressed against his coat. “Even if I’m not—not a virgin any more?”

“Allie!”

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?”

“Are you sorry?” he asked, piqued.

“Not if you aren’t.”

“Well, I’m not. We’re going to be married, aren’t we? Just as soon as we’re out of school.”

She smiled faintly. “That’s six years, isn’t it?”

When she said it that way it sounded even longer than it already was. It was something they had talked a great deal about. They had even started trying to save money. Raoul, Miguel knew, would be both amused and annoyed if he knew about it. But Raoul—Raoul was too busy with Becky, wasn’t he? Too busy making a—a cuckold out of his oldest son to be bothered with anything Miguel might be hiding from him.

Miguel decided to change the subject. “It’s eleven-thirty. Do you want to go? What time do you have to be in tonight?”

“Two. All right, let’s go.”

“We can stop at the Indian Drive-In for something when we get to Paly,” Miguel offered.

“No. I want to go to Frenchman’s Tor.” She looked up at him and smiled uncertainly. She looked wonderful in that deep-necked red dress, Miguel thought. She had such a marvelous body. Those perfect breasts and the rounded curve of her hips—the way her thighs were so firm and hard, like a dancer’s—He knew every part of her and just thinking about it made him feel strange and throbbing inside.

“I’ve got something to talk to you about,” Allie said. “Let’s hurry.”

“Yes,” he said, looking at her. “We’ll hurry.”

Lawt Higby and Florian caught them in the lobby.

“Hey,” Higby said. “Where are you two going?”

“Home,” Miguel said shortly. He had never liked Higby much, and he liked him less now that he was sharing Tom’s Florian with the Montezuma guy and his Buick Century.

Higby laughed suggestively. “Ill bet you’re going home,” he said.

Florian said, “We’re all going out to the Cliff House. Why don’t you come along?”

Allie, holding on to Miguel’s arm, said, “No, thanks. Not tonight.”

“Leave ’em alone. They can get in a couple of hours heavy mugging if they leave now,” Higby said.

Miguel grabbed Higby’s arm. “How about minding your own business, wise guy?”

Higby looked back surprised. “Well, okay. No need to get sore about it, Mike.”

Miguel released him and turned to Allie. “Let’s go,” he said. They walked down Montgomery Street toward the parking lot. Miguel said, “I’m sorry about Lawt, Allie.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

They passed a newsstand. The headline on the Chronicle said, TENSION EASED. The Examiner said, PEACE IN OUR TIME—CHAMBERLAIN. Both papers carried a picture of the British Prime Minister being greeted by crowds of cheering Englishmen at

Croydon. His face looked haggard and he carried that ridiculous umbrella.

Allie said, “That frightens me, Mike.”

“All that junk in Europe?”

“Is there going to be a war, Mike?”

“Olinder says there is. Maybe not for a couple of years yet, but sure as anything there’ll be a war.”

Allie shivered slightly. “You sound almost as though you hope there would be.”

“I guess I’ve read too many air pulps,” he said, smiling at her. “You really want to fly, don’t you, Mike?”

“Fly and write. Nothing else matters much to me, Allie. Except you.”

“Oh, Mike. I hope you mean that. I’m so scared.”

“Why, Allie? What is there to be scared about?”

“Let’s get to the Tor quickly. Please, Mike.”

“All right, Allie. We’ll make it fast.”

They sat close together in the darkness, the car radio playing softly. Below, the lights of the valley spread out in a diminishing pattern. The green beacon light atop the big hangar at Moffett Field flashed alternately green and white.

“The Army is taking Moffett over,” Miguel said. “It’s going to be a basic flying school. That’s the second stage of training.”

“Don’t talk about the Army and flying, Mike.”

He laughed softly and said, “All right, Allie.”

“Turn the radio off?”

He reached forward and turned the knob.

“Now kiss me, Mike. Please.”

“With pleasure,” he said. He was aroused instantly by the insistent passion of her kiss.

“No, wait. I have to tell you something and it isn’t easy. Let me sit a minute.”

He waited, his brow knit in perplexity. Finally, he said, “Allie, what’s the matter?”

She drew a deep breath and said, “I think I’m going to have a baby, Mike. I think I’m pregnant.”

It took him a full minute to absorb the impact of what she was saying. Pictures of Mr. Wylie’s furious Scots face flashed through his mind. And Mrs. Wylie. And above all, Raoul. He felt as though an icy emptiness had moved into the pit of his stomach. It was another thirty seconds before he could speak.

“How do you know, Allie?” he asked hollowly.

She sat very still, not touching him. “I’ve missed two periods,’” she said, her voice low.

“Two—” It came to him in a rush that he had been thinking exclusively of himself. Allie had been worried about this for a month and she had kept it to herself. He put his arm around her and pulled her against his chest. “Jesus, Allie, why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want to worry you. I’ve been irregular before—ever since—well, ever since we started.”

He swallowed hard and said, “Then you’re still not sure.”

“Pretty sure, Mike.”

“But not absolutely.”

“No, I guess not absolutely.” He could feel her relaxing a little against him. She was relying on him now, transferring the load of worry and fright to him.

“Damn,” he said, “let me think now.” The images of Mr. and Mrs. Wylie and Raoul came back into his mind, forcing coherent thoughts out. He took out a pack of cigarettes.

“What are we going to do, Mike?” Allie asked.

“Well—first off we have to be sure,” he said. “I guess that means you have to be examined by a doctor.”

“Oh, Mike!”

“It can’t be Doc Winthrop or any of the ones who know us or our families—” His mind was racing now, trying to find a way out of the sudden maze. “We’ll have to go up to San Mateo or the city and find one. That’s the first thing.”

“When, Mike?”

“I guess not later than next week. If you haven’t come around by then, we’ll have to go up and get some doctor to look at you.”

“Oh, Mike—I’m going to hate that,” Allie said shakily.

“I don’t see what else we can do, Allie. We have to know.”

She looked at him steadily. “And if he says I am?”

“Why—” Miguel felt trapped. “I guess we’ll have to get married, Allie. What else can we do?”

“Is that what you want?”

How could he explain that though he loved her and wanted her more than anything in the world, the idea of getting married at sixteen terrified him. Not only that, they would have to face Raoul and her mother and father. He couldn’t let her see how shaken he was.

“Yes, of course, Allie. It’s what we both want anyway.”

She buried her face in his coat and said, “Oh, God, I was hoping you’d feel that way, Mike. I was so frightened—so awfully frightened.”

A land of calm seemed to descend over him. “We’ll go up to San Mateo on Saturday,” he said. “You be sure to wear stuff that makes you look older. We’ll get a doctor to look you over. Ill look one up.” He automatically slipped a hand inside her dress to cup her breast gently. It felt tight and distended to him, the way pregnant women’s breasts are supposed to feel, with the nipple small and erect. A wave of desire for her crashed over him. She was really his now. “Then,” he went on in a trembling voice, “if he says it’s true I’ll see Luis and borrow some money. We can get to Reno in four hours and get married.”

Allie was breathing in rhythm with the steady movement of his hands across her bosom. Her eyes were half-closed. “Oh, darling, oh, Mike—think—to sleep all night with you. To wake up and see you there beside me in the morning, Mike, Mike—” He reached for the zipper of her dress and then stopped. “Is it all right? I mean it won’t do any harm?”

She shook her head and said in a barely audible voice, “No, no, it won’t do any harm.”

The next Saturday Miguel waited in the parking lot of the Medico-Dental Building in San Mateo. Allie had been inside for more than an hour. His breathing was thick and uneven. The sheltering dark was gone and he found to his dismay that he was terrified.

Other cars shimmered in the morning sunlight. Everything seemed unreal to him. He kept praying: Please, God, don’t let it be. Please, God—

Allie had done her best to follow his instructions. She had worn a suit and high heels and plenty of make-up to make her look older, but the effect had only been to make her look like a little girl playing dress-up. No matter what Allie did to herself she looked just over sixteen. Well, goddam it, that’s all she was. The wedding band from the novelty store hadn’t looked bona fide on her finger. It had just looked pathetic.

Even buying the ring had been an ordeal. The salesgirl had smirked at Miguel and he was sure she had known why he was buying it. Oh, God, how something so wonderful could lead to something so tawdry.

Miguel looked at the dashboard clock. She had been in there so long. But he had no idea of how long she had to wait or if she had to take a lot of tests or anything. Ignorance was hideous, he thought. It made you suffer three times more than you needed to.

The leaves were falling, red-gold in the autumn sunshine. People were walking by on the street. They looked so unconcerned. A woman with a little boy and a bag of groceries. She looked so ordinary. But she wasn’t ordinary at all. She wasn’t real and that made her extraordinary indeed. She was part of a dream he was having. A dream that he would awake from and Allie would be all right and everything would be just the way it should be. He kept wanting to pinch himself, hoping he wouldn’t feel it.

Allie had been terrific. All the way up from Los Altos she had been laughing and chattering away as if she were on the way to a party.

Miguel resolved that no matter what happened, ever, he would never fail her. Not Allie. She was everything to him. More important than school, more important than writing or flying or even Raoul.

He saw her come out of the building and walk toward the car.

Her head was down and she was crying.

It was going to be true, he thought. It was going to be true after all.

“Let’s get away quickly, Mike,” Allie said in a strangled voice. “Oh, God, let’s get away from this place.”

He started the car and drove out into the traffic on El Camino Real, heading south.

“He knew I wasn’t married,” Allie said. There were tears streaking her cheeks, smearing her make-up. “He could tell right away.”

“Well, what did he say, Allie? I mean everything.”

She shook her head and fumbled in her bag for a handkerchief. “Oh, Mike—I don’t know. The usual things, I guess. About staying off rough roads and being careful about things—” She took out a booklet and a sheet of paper with the doctor’s name on it. “He gave me this stuff—diet and prenatal care, and—oh, Mike!”

She broke down completely and began to sob wretchedly on his shoulder. “What are we going to do—what are we going to do?”

“Well go see Luis,” Miguel said.

“I felt so awful,” she said brokenly. “He didn’t even want me to come back. ‘Just see your regular family physician, Mrs. Rinehart, that’s all.’ That’s what he told me, Mike. He called me Mrs. Rinehart and he didn’t believe it for a minute—”

“It’ll be true the next time you see some goddam doctor,” Miguel said through his teeth.

Allie lay down on the seat with her head on his lap. She kept crying softly. “I’m so scared, Mike.”

Miguel took a deep breath and said, “There’s nothing to be afraid of, Allie. Luis will lend me some money and well be in Reno by tomorrow night.” He put one hand on her cheek and said, “Let me handle this from now on, Allie. We’ll be all right.”

It was not until May 1947 that he spoke of that day again. He sat with Alaine on the terrace of the Gran Savoia in Rapallo. The sun was warm and the Mediterranean sparkling blue. There was a pair of racing sailboats tacking out of the harbor, their varicolored sails brilliant red and orange against the cobalt water. Rapallo’s white houses and pink villas rose tier on tier from the sea, set in dark green foliage.

Alaine wore a red-and-white striped blouse and tight black Italian slacks. The sun had burnt her blond hair, streaking it in a way that reminded him of Aldyth’s, and perhaps for that reason he told Alaine the story for the first time.

She heard him out in silence, toying with her vermouth.

“We went to see Luis all right,” he said presently. “We saw him that Saturday night.”

“He lent you the money?”

“As a matter of fact, no.” Miguel smiled ruefully at her. “It seemed he didn’t have enough in the house and since it was Saturday he had no way to get any until the following Monday” He shrugged. “It was like that. Not that we doubted for a moment that he would actually help us.” He was silent for a time and then he said, “Well, perhaps he did, in a way. He told Raoul.”

“Oh, Mike. He didn’t.”

“He sure did, friend. We didn’t know, of course. He called him after we left. He’d told us to just sit tight for a day or so and we’d be in good shape. We thought he meant one thing and he obviously meant something else. Anyway, I took Allie home and in the meanwhile Luis was telling Becky and maybe it was her idea to call Raoul. I never did find out about it exactly.” He moved his glass in slow circles on the enameled steel table.

The sailboats were almost clear of the headland now. Their bright sheets were like flower petals on the placid, sparkling face of the sea.

Presently, Miguel continued, thinking that even yet, the memory was painful. “Raoul didn’t waste any time at all. He called Allie’s parents and there was a synod about what to do with us. They decided we were too young to get married, of course—which we were. There was no denying that. But you see, we weren’t consulted about it. They decided in their own way. Oh, I guess it must have been pretty hard on Mr. and Mrs. Wylie. Maybe even on Raoul, too. But they were civilized as all hell about it. They decided that it had to be taken care of—and Mr. Wylie being a lawyer, I guess—he knew where and how. So by the time I took Allie home that night, it was all cut and dried.” He paused and finished his Cinzano slowly. “I never saw her again.”

“Mike—” Alaine said sympathetically. “They couldn’t have done anything so cruel to a couple of kids.”

“They could and they did. They took her to some place in the city—I never did know where. I damned near went out of my mind.”

“But surely she tried to get in touch with you?”

He looked up at her before signaling the waiter for another pair of drinks.

“Yes, she did. I got a phone call about a month after that—around the end of October, I think it was. She’d sneaked to a telephone somewhere in this hospital or rest home—what the hell would you call a high-type abortionists place, anyway? The only thing I could get out of her was that they’d taken the baby—that was the way she put it—they’d taken the baby and it was all over. Oh, yes. She said that they’d hurt her. She must have been under sedation or something of the sort because I could hardly understand her. I kept yelling at her to tell me where the place was so that I could find it, and she couldn’t tell me. All she could say was that they’d hurt her and taken the baby.”

Alaine shook her head with a pained expression in her eyes. “How awful for you.”

“And for her. Hell, for her parents too. Think how we’d feel if something like that had happened to Dorrie? I couldn’t think at all about them and when somebody came and dragged her away from the telephone I just about went crazy. I had been at her house every day. The Wylies wouldn’t see me at all. Finally her father did, and he told me if he ever saw me out around again he’d see to it Allie never came back. I didn’t know that was what they had in mind anyway, so I did stay away—but after that call I came apart. I took off for the city to look for her. To look for her, for God’s sake, in a city of three-quarters of a million people! That will give you some idea of how a seventeen-year-old mind works.”

The waiter brought their Cinzano on the rocks and Miguel paid him before going on.

“Needless to say, I did not find her.”

Alaine said quietly, “Or you wouldn’t be here now.”

“Christ, I don’t know. That was 1938—this is 1947. A hell of a lot can happen in nine years. But they didn’t give us a chance to find out for ourselves, you see? That’s what drove the stake in. I guess I went a little screwy after that. It was almost a year before I started taking anyone else out—and I spent about as much time getting loopy drunk as any seventeen-year-old punk you ever saw. I developed quite a reputation as a screw-you hell-raiser.”

“I’ll bet you did,” Alaine said.

Miguel leaned back in his chair and squinted against the high, bright Italian sun. “I received a letter from her, too. In about December. She told me she was feeling fine now and that she was going to be traveling in Europe for a while. That’s all. It was a—well, resigned sort of letter. As though whoever had been working on her had convinced her that this was the right thing to do. Allie was like that, of course. In a way she was the greatest little conformist you ever could imagine. The letter was mailed from Norfolk, Virginia. She had relatives there. That’s the last of it. Whenever anyone asked about her, her folks would tell them she was abroad. It must have cost them more than they could afford, but they did have money. And it salved their pride to have her finish her education in Switzerland.” He laughed ruefully and added, “I was going to run away and get over there on a tramp steamer. How’s that for romantic, dumb, young youth? But I never heard from her again, so my beau geste was only an incomplete pass.”

Alaine, after listening to him, had said pityingly, “Poor dear Mike. You’ve really held on to all this, haven’t you?” And then she had gone on to make her classic remark, “I’m glad you told me the whole thing at last—the reason you’ve never stopped looking after your tragic love.”

He had been angry with her for making what he considered to be a facetious comment. But he had given no sign of it, because only he knew how much he was withholding. The way he had relied on Tom during that period, for example. He had said nothing about that. And yet, without Tom to stand by him he would have cracked up completely. Because he had loved Allie Wylie. In spite of everything and all the unpleasant truths that came with self-knowledge—truths he was withholding from Alaine now—he had loved Allie Wylie very much. And Tom had helped him bury the unpleasant truths with a parranda—a hell-raising carousal that had lasted more than a year.

Truth wasn’t easy to come by. Not when the truth concerned yourself.

The aficionados of the bull ring had a phrase for the climax of the brave festival. El momento de verdad—the moment of truth. It was a catch phrase now for all the neohispanophiles who sought to commit words to paper in the manner of Hemingway. But vulgarization hadn’t reduced the aptness of phrase. It was still the instant when a person was said to see himself with clarity.

In the matter of Allie Wylie, Miguel’s momento de verdad had come on New Year’s Day, 1939.

He had driven to Roslyn to see Karl Olinder and to borrow some trig texts from Mr. Snell, the mathematics master. He was far behind in Snell’s classes. Since Allie went away he had been increasingly lax about completing assignments and truant a good part of the time, so that Mr. Hamner had complained to Raoul and had insisted that Miguel catch up during the winter

Miguel had taken to driving to the city almost every day to see Tom. Even after Raoul expressly forbade it, he had continued to do so, turning back the car’s odometer so that he couldn’t be checked.

On the way home he stopped in Palo Alto to see Midge. She was getting around a little more and she liked to have Miguel stop by to give her all the news. She wasn’t as shy about her face with him as she was with some of the others in the crowd. But Midge wasn’t home and neither were her parents.

Acting on long habit left over from the hot summer days, he had parked the Chevrolet down the street under a particularly sheltered oak.

He walked down the path and out onto Waverly Street, suddenly noticing the odd stillness of the day. Everyone was at an open house or a party somewhere, he thought. He had been asked to Florian’s open house but without Tom and Allie he had decided he would rather not go, and so now he found himself alone.

He walked slowly toward his car, noting the strange feel of the day—the quality of emptiness. The street was deserted Nothing moved. The sun, shining coldly through a rift in the low clouds, tinted everything with a fey, yellowish light. The trees lining Waverly cast tenuous shadows with their bare branches. His footsteps echoed in the silence. There was no wind, no sound of life in the blank-faced houses. He had the sensation of being alone in the silent town.

Across the street, a door opened, creaking dryly. A woman bundled against the chill, walked carefully down the stone steps toward the street. She reached the sidewalk and paused. Miguel watched her, caught up by some inner tension.

Her face was very white, almost yellow in the strange light. Her eyes looked large and luminous. She looked across the pavement at him without seeing him.

He turned away. Even with the loose, heavy coat she wore, he could see that her belly was swollen with a child. He walked toward his car. He could not have said why, but there was a tightness in the small of his back. It was almost as though he sensed the hoarse cry forming in the woman’s throat.

When it came, it was a strangled cry for help, a blind appeal. He turned and looked back.

The woman cried, “Oh, God, oh, my baby, my baby—1”

She stood rocking for a moment, her legs apart, her hands clutching at the air for support. Then, horribly, the spasm of a labor pain struck her, doubling her up. She uttered a scream of pain and fell face down, thudding on the cement, where she lay moaning.

Miguel stood rooted to the ground. His heart seemed to swell suddenly and fill his chest. Allie, Allie, Allie—Fear and disgust blended into panic. He ran for the car, slammed the door closed behind him. He started up as doors began opening along the street. He drove blindly, too fast and without direction. He did not stop until he had reached the security of Frenchman’s Tor.

He was shaking, frightened and guilty. A woman had cried out for help and he had run away. He had reacted with shocked, animal horror. And with something else.

A woman had started to give birth to a child on the street and he had thought of Allie. Suddenly he knew beyond a doubt that he had never really wanted to marry Aldyth. Never. He had lied to her and to himself. His feeling had been almost the same as this afternoon. Shock, and then a withdrawal. The thought of marrying Allie—the thought of marrying anyone had been terrifying.

He had been glad when they took her away. He loved her—and yet he had been glad, relieved.

He buried his face in his hands and whimpered under the crushing burden of his shame.

No one would ever know.

No one.

Except himself.

He threw himself on the seat and screwed his eyes up tight, trying to force tears, something, anything, to relieve this great knot of self-contempt, of self-hatred inside him.

He put his hands to his throat and held his mothers medallion against his chest. I’m a fraud, he thought, I’m a fake and a fraud.

He had gone through the motions of love, he had fooled Allie and Tom and Raoul and Allie’s mother and father and even, for a time, himself. He was empty inside. He had no real capacity for love. He could feel nothing genuine—ever.

FIFTEEN

Miguel sat smoking drowsily in the dark as the airplane flew steadily west at three hundred and fifty miles an hour—almost six miles every minute.

He was thinking of the amazing havoc one genuinely destructive person could create. The strangest part of it all was that anyone who tried to save such a person became fair game.

The question that occurred to him now, as it had so many times before, was simply: Why should anyone put up with it? In a herd of wild beasts, the rogue was always driven out. No one tried to save him.

One night, he remembered, after Aldyth went away, he had frightened Tom almost out of his wits. Tom had been staying in Los Altos with him for the weekend and they had taken the Chevy to the city and ended up at El Prado for endless rounds of gin fizzes at dinnertime. Miguel hadn’t eaten. He kept talking drunkenly about finding Allie. Then someone at the bar had said something and Miguel had thrown himself at him in a blind rage and the bartenders and waiters had rushed him out of the place and told him not to come back.

Then they had gone to Li Po’s in Chinatown for more drinks and Miguel had insisted on Tom’s taking him to a whorehouse. They tried three before they found one that would let Miguel in. He was stiffly drunk and in an ugly mood. There had been a madam and three girls in the room, he remembered—in the living room of a flat somewhere on Bush Street. The madam had been reading a newspaper story about the pledge given to Poland by Daladier and Chamberlain in case of Nazi attack, and she had regarded Tom and Miguel sadly, commenting on the fact that they were both about military age and wasn’t it too bad about all that European trouble. One girl, a tired redhead, had been warming her feet before an electric heater and staring out the open window at the rainy night. Miguel had chosen her without a moment’s hesitation, treating her with sarcastically elaborate courtesy. But once in the bedroom he felt miserable and lonely and the girl had asked him “what sort of party” he wanted and he hadn’t known what to answer. He didn’t understand her and had no desire for her anyway. She worked over him for a long while, and when it was finally over, he felt sick and savagely angry. He had refused to let Tom drive home and had covered the Skyline route between San Francisco and Los Altos in under an hour, driving eighty and eighty-five all the way on the wet mountain roads.

Tom had said after that, “Do you have to try and kill me, too?”

And the frightening part of it had been that he actually had wanted Tom to stay with him, even if they crashed a barrier and ended under thirty feet of water in Crystal Springs Lake.

In June of 1939, Miguel was graduated from Roslyn and registered at Stanford. That summer Luis went into the Navy—to do his year of military service. And Becky went to Reno and divorced him.

On the first weekend in August, Raoul and the Eubankses drove to Reno. Tom stayed in Los Altos with Miguel and the two of them promoted a roaring, drunken party that ended with several couples nearly drowning in the swimming pool at five in the morning and then a road race through the hills of Los Altos which Miguel and a dark girl from Mountain View named Yvonne something won hands down from Tom and a girl from Redwood City. Lawt Higby wrecked his car on the hill climb section over The Twisters, and Billy Alberg was so shocked by the proceedings that he hitchhiked from Los Altos to Mountain View where he could catch a Greyhound for home.

On Sunday night, while Tom and Miguel were cleaning up the aftermath of their party, a wire arrived from Raoul. Miguel opened it and began to laugh. Tom took it and read: BECKY AND I WERE MARRIED TODAY HOME TUESDAY LOVE DAD.

Miguel sat down and stopped laughing suddenly. He was thinking about the time Raoul saw him rubbing her back. And the night in Paradise Cove. He crumpled the telegram in his hands and said to Tom, “Let’s go drink a toast to the newlyweds.”

“Oh, Christ,” Tom said. “I don’t know if my guts will take any more.”

“Come on,” Miguel said sharply. “We have to celebrate. I just got a brand-new stepmother.”

That night they had serenaded Florian with “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” they had raced at full throttle around the circle at Castilleja until some housemother called the police, and had ended sleeping on the second tee of the Menlo golf course, with the Chevy bogged down in a ditch.

In September, when school opened, Miguel had his first real quarrel with Raoul.

Raoul could not see why Miguel couldn’t live at home and drive the seven miles to school every day. Miguel refused. The unpleasantness of their disagreement occupied all their thoughts, so that the invasion of Poland, the beginning of the war in Europe, was nothing more than a background of discord for the clash of father and son.

In the end, it was Becky who prevailed on Raoul to allow Miguel at least one year of living away from home. Raoul accused her of always “taking up” for Miguel, and she replied that he was, after all, his father’s son. This remark, meant to be a compliment, infuriated Miguel.

The years were beginning to show on his father, Miguel thought, and as time went on he grew less active and more testily demanding. Miguel thought of his affair with Becky as a last fling of delayed youth, an ugly foolishness that shamed him. He, Miguel, carried a kind of murky anger inside himself constantly when he thought of his father.

Raoul’s heart condition was worse; still not enough to incapacitate him. But it was enough to slow down his activities so that he spent a good deal of his time at home rather than in the office and his health was the main topic of conversation between himself and Becky. The Nereid had been sold. Raoul no longer had any interest in yachting. Miguel wondered how long it would take a woman as young and restless as Becky to get bored.

On the morning of May 5, 1940, Miguel drove the red Chevrolet into the drive at home. He saw with some satisfaction that Becky’s new Olds was parked in the courtyard. It was a yellow convertible with a black top and it had been her wedding present from Raoul. Miguel often wondered what the neighbors thought when they saw her driving around in the car, knowing that she had divorced Luis to marry his father. But then the Rineharts had never considered themselves part of any community, so it didn’t really matter what anyone thought of them.

It was warm and he peeled off his sweater as he got out of the car, tying it around his waist by the sleeves. He was thinking of Tom, waiting back at Encina with Julie Trowbridge. The poor old uncle had really managed to run himself into a cul-de-sac.

Miguel walked through the gate around to the back of the house. He could hear music down by the pool. He made his way through the flowering shrubs toward the sound. Avery met him on the path.

“Master Michael,” the houseman said, pleased. “Good to see you. You’re a stranger in these parts lately.”

“Been pretty busy with midterms,” Miguel said. “Dad around?”

“Mister Rinehart is napping,” Avery said. “But the Missus, she’s down by the pool.”

“I’ll see her, then.”

“Can I bring you some lunch? Something to drink, maybe?” Avery asked.

“Some iced coffee would be perfect.”

“Iced coffee coming up.” A white smile flashed in the dark face and he walked on up toward the house. Miguel went on down to the pool.

The water sparkled, clear and turquoise in the May sunlight It was early to have the pool open but the spring had been warm and it looked like an early summer. From where he stood he could see the huge silver shape of the hangar at Moffett dominating the rest of the structures in the valley. To the south, the plume of steam from the Permanente Cement plant rose straight into the still morning. Miguel remembered the uproar it had caused when the plant was built. Raoul had served on committees to bar it from the area, there had been editorials in the papers, and demonstrations of how the dust from the plant would turn Los Altos into a desert. But the plant had been built anyway, and Los Altos had remained much as it had always been except for the sight of Henry Kaiser’s blue Cad Sixty Special with the red lights on the front speeding down Fremont Road every morning.

Becky lay on an aluminum-and-green canvas chaise. She wore a two-piece bathing suit that left her midriff bare. She lay face up with a towel across her eyes. There was a popular novel face down on the coping stones beside her, and a bottle of suntan oil (Miguel frowned as he remembered that), a package of cigarettes, a box of Kleenex, a glass of iced tea or coffee, a pair of Japanese geta, and a softly playing portable radio on the steel table.

Miguel regarded her in silence for a moment. She was attractive, there was no denying that. She was still under thirty and she had a good-looking body and a passionate, full mouth. He had always thought her rather stupid, but he had to admit that a woman who could marry two Rineharts in less than a generation couldn’t be completely unintelligent.

That she had a weakness for Rineharts was obvious enough. Miguel didn’t think she had married Raoul because of his money. In the first place, there wasn’t enough money to make it worth all that; and in the second place Becky had never given any indication of being governed by anything but glands. Luis simply had not been enough man for her and she had gone directly to the source for more.

Miguel wondered at the instinct that had told her Raoul, who professed such family loyalty, would put horns on his son just for the pleasure of enjoying her body.

She must be quite a piece, Miguel thought with deliberate vulgarity. She must be hotter than a two-dollar pistol. What a hell of a time it was for Raoul to start feeling his age and infirmities—now that he had Becky to keep his bed warm all the time.

For a moment Miguel despised her, and his father as well.

He walked across the stone deck toward her. She heard him and sat up.

“Hi,” Miguel said.

“Mike—” She sounded surprised. “What are you doing here? I thought you were having your exams this week.”

“I am. Had a couple of free periods. Dad sleeping?”

“Yes. Sit down.”

How easily she took over the role of chatelaine, Miguel thought. Making the younger son of the lord and master feel at ease in his own home.

“Thanks.” He sat down and lit a cigarette. “Been in?” He indicated the pool.

“Not yet.” She laughed coquettishly. “You know me.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, Ma.”

Becky frowned. “Mike—”

He looked at her.

She said, “We had that all out, didn’t we? Were still good friends, just like we always were?”

“Sure, Becky,” he said. “As a matter of fact, that’s why I’m here.”

She swung her legs over the side of the chaise and sat up, watching him with an expression of concern. “You aren’t in any kind of trouble—”

“Again?” He laughed. “Is that what you were going to say?”

“No. That’s not what I was going to say and you know it.”

“Well, trust old Becky to sniff out problems,” he said looking at his cigarette. “Our own Gestapo.”

“There is something, isn’t there?”

How she could belabor the obvious, Miguel thought wonderingly. Wasn’t there always something with the goddam Rineharts?

“Yes,” he said. “I need some money.”

Becky heaved a sigh of relief. “Oh, is that all?”

“Don’t you want to ask me what for? I might be in debt to gangsters. Or I might need it for paying off blackmailers.”

“Don’t joke, Mike. How much do you need?”

“Two hundred dollars.”

“That’s quite a bit, Mike.”

She thought a moment and then said, “Is your checking account flat?”

“Not completely.”

Avery arrived with Miguel’s iced coffee tinkling in a tall glass. They waited until he had gone before saying anything more.

Then Becky said, “I don’t know, really. Two hundred dollars—”

“Is a lot of money for me,” Miguel finished for her. “That is just why I had to come home for it.” He paused, watching her. “You’re really making quite a big thing out of not asking me why I need it.”

“Do you want to tell me?”

“I don’t mind. I need it for medical attention. That’s a nice polite way to put it, I think.”

Becky’s frown was puzzled as well. “Medical attention? Whatever are you talking about?”

“Do you really want to know? Wouldn’t it be easier to simply give me the money and let it go?”

“I can’t let it go now, Mike. What medical attention do you need two hundred dollars for?”

He thought for a moment and decided to use Tom’s own words. “Well,” he said deliberately, “it seems your gay stepson has gone and gotten himself a dose.”

The blood slowly drained from Becky’s face.

“You do understand what I mean?” he asked.

She nodded. “Yes,” she said faintly. “Yes, I understand.”

He shrugged. “That’s about all there is to it. I haven’t enough dough in my account to pay for the shots I have to take and I can’t expect the school health program to cover this sort of—”

“Yes,” she said again, not looking at him. “How did it happen, Mike?” she asked in a thin voice.

“You don’t want the details.”

“No. No, of course not,” she said.

“So?”

She shook her head and said nothing. Miguel watched the perspiration gleam on her bronzed skin.

“Shall I ask Dad?” His voice was flinty in texture.

“No, Mike. It would upset him terribly.”

“Yes, I guess it would.”

“I’ll get the money for you.”

He stood up and looked down at her, coldly appraising. “Thank you, Mother,” he said softly.

She turned her face up. He looked at her and she at him and for a long while neither said anything. Finally he smiled at her and said, “I’ve grown up, Becky.”

She chewed nervously on her lower Up.

“I won’t wake Dad,” Miguel said. “Tell him I was here, will you?”

Becky nodded, not taking her eyes from him. He walked to the path and turned around to give her a half-wave. “See you,” he said.

That day was, for Miguel, the beginning of a strange sort of intimacy between Becky and himself. It was an unwanted intimacy, on his part at least, for he found it impossible to forget that Raoul had committed an unpardonable sin in taking a woman away from his own son. Yet, when the school term was over and Miguel returned home for the summer, he found himself seeking Becky’s company more and more often, until at last Raoul was moved to speak to Becky and suggest that Miguel associate more with people his own age.

This wasn’t so simply arranged. Other than Julian Trowbridge, Miguel had made few friends at Stanford. He had done some pieces for The Chaparral, but he had maintained such an aloofness while doing so that his co-workers thought him cold. He saw Tom Eubanks occasionally, though Tom had taken a job for part of the summer in a Forest Service blister rust control camp in the Stanislaus. “To keep the dangling dibble dainty,” he explained to Miguel on one of the weekends in the city. The sulfanilamides had done their work and Tom reported he was “pure as the driven snow.”

Miguel’s dating habits were fitful through the summer. He took an assortment of girls to an assortment of entertainments ranging from ale busts at Alpers on Skyline to the tea dances at the Plaza, but nothing interested him enough to pursue it.

He missed the Fair, the good bands, like Count Basie and Gene Krupa. But Treasure Island was lifeless now; all the buildings were either being torn down or taken over by the Navy. There was some talk of expanding the trans-Pacific Clipper base there into a municipal airport, but that came to nothing.

Florian O’Connor made a big play for him that summer, but after a few dates he stopped calling her, and she informed her friends that she had told Mike Rinehart to stay away until he got over that little slut Allie Wylie.

Occasionally Miguel would take Midge Kimball to the late matinee at the Varsity. She liked dark places, where her face wouldn’t show. She was getting ready to begin two years of intermittent plastic surgery.

But throughout most of that summer of 1940, Miguel was with Becky. Raoul had a bad siege through July and August, the tumult of the conventions excited him and for a time Dr. Winthrop was sincerely worried about him. Becky displayed an amazing aptitude for nursing Raoul, and Miguel did what he could to help.

By the time school opened in September, it was obvious to Miguel that Raoul was not going to let him return to Stanford except as a day student, and he resigned himself to living at home.

“It won’t be as bad as all that, will it, Mike?” Becky asked.

“It’ll be bad enough,” he said.

“Your dad just wants you with him,” she said. “And so do I.”

Miguel studied her face for a moment and then he said, “I can’t figure what he does want. He wants me here, all right. But he doesn’t want me hanging around with you, does he?”

“Mike, what a thing to say,” Becky protested.

“He’s jealous, Becky.”

“Of you?” She tried hard to sound derisive and almost succeeded.

Miguel flushed. “So the big stallion couldn’t be jealous of his get?”

“Mike, I won’t have you talking like this.”

“No,” he said ironically. “I guess you won’t.”

“And just what does that mean?”

“Oh, hell,” Miguel said miserably, “why can’t he just let me go live at school the way I wanted to?”

As Raoul grew older he put more and more restrictions on the people around him, and with Essie in the convent and Luis gone he had only Becky and Miguel. Raoul’s pressure had the effect of reinforcing their already established intimacy.

The thing that made it so painful for Miguel was that there were times when he loathed Becky with all his heart. He would watch her fawning on his father, indulging in the most outrageous flattery, and he would feel like bellowing at her. She often told Raoul that he was the finest driver she had ever ridden in a car with. This at a time when Raoul was most severely criticizing Miguel for recklessness at the wheel. The truth was that Raoul was an exceptionally poor driver and steadily getting worse as his health deteriorated, and Miguel would set his teeth to hold back the caustic comments that welled up inside him. Once Becky had told Raoul in Miguel’s hearing that he was the most physically desirable man she knew. At fifty, Raoul was now running to fat. His torso and chest had thickened immensely and he had a substantial paunch. To Miguel, the sight of his father’s heavy torso on chicken-thin, hairless legs, was repulsive.

The main result of Becky’s absurd flatteries was to establish firmly in Miguel’s mind the notion that Becky habitually lied to Raoul and that Raoul would believe anything Becky said to him—provided, of course, that it was a compliment of some kind. And Becky produced nothing but compliments where Raoul was concerned.

Late in 1941, Raoul grew concerned over the possibility of currency restrictions in Mexico, where he had substantial investments. It was a possibility, certainly, with the international situation growing steadily worse.

Late in November, he flew—much against Dr. Winthrop’s orders—to Mexico City to see his factor there. Becky remained at home. Miguel drove him to the airport in Becky’s Olds.

On the way up, Raoul talked about Luis. He did so often these days. “Card from your brother,” he would say. “From San Diego.” Or from Bremerton, or from Hawaii—wherever Luis’s Naval Intelligence duties took him. “Your brother made full lieutenant,” Raoul would comment. “Not bad for the Rineharts, eh?”

It seemed to Miguel that it was a deliberate effort to convince him that no matter how deep the wound, Luis was still part of the family. In fact, the assertion that there was a family at all was something Raoul seemed to be in constant need of proving.

They arrived at Mills Field on a cold and blustery winter morning. Miguel saw to his father’s luggage and then parked the car.

Raoul was waiting for him in the terminal coffee shop. He had ordered two coffees and they were already on the table. Waiters and waitresses automatically gave Raoul good service. He was still an imposing man, still a man a maître d’ could fawn over.

Miguel listened vaguely to Raoul’s instructions for the regulation and care of the house, realizing that he would do none of the things Raoul wanted done and that Becky would simply run the place as she saw fit.

“Are you listening to me, young man?”

The sound of airplanes had set Miguel to woolgathering. He was, in fact, thinking about money. Finances had become a problem. Years before, Raoul had promised Miguel he would be permitted to learn to fly as soon as he was old enough. But after two years of refusals, Miguel had decided that (according to Raoul) he would never be old enough to learn. Being under age precluded his signing up for the CPT squadron at school without Raoul’s consent and a quarterly report on his grade card. So he had simply saved his allowance and book money and bought dual time at the Progressive Flying School down on Middlefield Road. When it had come time for him to solo, he had forged Raoul’s signature—which was an illegible scrawl anyway—and he now had almost twenty hours of solo time. But he was perennially poverty-stricken. The flying ate up all his resources.

“I said, Miguel,” Raoul said in Spanish, “are you listening to me? Me escuchas?”

When his father spoke to him in Spanish, Miguel always made a point of paying attention.

“I will be back next weekend,” Raoul said. “I want you to behave yourself like a gentleman while I’m away.”

“I will,” Miguel said.

“I’ve been concerned about you, lately, hijo. You’ve had a very peculiar attitude. It worries me.”

Miguel studied his father’s face. Was it possible, he wondered, that he doesn’t know what’s been graveling me since Luis went away?

“Now about Becky,” Raoul said.

Miguel made a particular point of looking him in the eye. “Yes, sir?”

“I wanted to bring her with me. She wanted to come. But you understand how things are in Mexico. Your mother’s people are there. It wouldn’t look good—”

No, it wouldn’t, Miguel thought. They have a name for what you’ve done down there. I don’t imagine you’d like Becky to hear it.

Raoul pinched the bridge of his nose and squinted at the lights. He looked tired. His face was lined and puffy with unhealthy fat. His breathing was deep and uneven. He had had to make arrangements to have oxygen all during the flight, and even then Dr. Winthrop was looking grim about it.

What had happened to the man he remembered? Miguel wondered—the man standing on The Spur in the high mountain quiet with his son beside him. There were times when Miguel felt as though Raoul were a complete stranger to him, a sick old man lapping up Becky’s stupid compliments as though they were the breath of life to him. Well, maybe they were, he concluded bleakly.

“I don’t want any drinking or parrandiando while I’m gone,” Raoul admonished. “Is that perfectly clear.”

Miguel nodded.

Raoul finished his coffee as they announced his flight. They left the restaurant and went outside where the DC-3 was loading.

“All right, hijo,” Raoul said. “Give me a kiss.”

Miguel let his father embrace him. He could feel the trembling of his arm. Traveling excited him now.

Watching him walk out to the airplane, Miguel had a pang of sadness. It was a feeling of loss, a wish for something that he knew he had never really had. Their relationship had never been what a father and son relationship should be. It never would be. They clashed and competed for everything. But to admit it was fatal. That was something Raoul was sure of, Miguel knew.

He stood there watching until the airplane vanished in the low stratus over the bay. He wished for a moment that his father might have asked him to go along. He could have helped. He could have looked after him—

He buttoned up the collar of the thigh-length camel’s hair coat Raoul had given him for his birthday and took out the pipe Raoul had selected for him at Thurlow’s last year. He put the cold pipe between his teeth and walked slowly back to the car.

The week passed quietly. On Wednesday, he and Becky drove up to one of the neighborhood movies in San Francisco to see Kitty Foyle—a picture Becky had missed on the first time around and one Miguel didn’t mind seeing again.

All week he had been edgy in Becky’s presence, and she in his. He attributed his feeling to the fact that he hadn’t been going out much and was hungry for female companionship. Miguel understood by now that he simply could not be without a woman long—and if the proper one did not present herself, almost anyone would do. It was more than a physical need. He liked the society of women, knowing as he did that most of them found him attractive and some of them found him exciting.

They ate alone all week, with Avery mixing a single cocktail before dinner and then serving the meal in that ghostly manner of the good houseman.

On Saturday night, they dined by candlelight on a whim of Becky’s. She wore a dirndl and he put on a tie because she seemed to want him to dress up a little.

After dinner, Becky poured brandies and Miguel settled down at her feet in front of the fire. It was almost too quiet now, with Avery in bed. He began to feel uncomfortable. When he sat to look into the fire, he imagined he could feel Becky’s eyes on the back of his neck.

“What do you think about those Japs in Washington, Becky?” he asked too brightly, knowing that Becky never read the newspapers.

“Your father is very worried about the Japanese situation,” Becky said.

Miguel stood up. He didn’t want to talk about his father and he wanted to talk about the Japanese situation even less. In fact he didn’t want to talk at all. He walked to the window and stood looking out over the valley and the road that traversed the hill to the house. “Car coming up,” he said, relieved. “Two cars.”

“Were you expecting anyone?” Becky asked.

“Me? No.”

“You seem so restless.”

“I am, I guess. I don’t know why.”

She sipped at her brandy and the firelight made her white dress the color of flame. He found himself thinking of Allie Wylie and a bitter chip of shame lay wedged in his throat. He was getting better at dissembling now and eventually, he knew, he would be able to forget the self-contempt. Perhaps he would even forget the truth.

“Dad heard from Luis last week,” he said suddenly. “Did he tell you?”

“Why, yes. He was promoted, wasn’t he?”

He looked at her steadily. “Just think,” he said. “If you’d stayed married to Luis you might have gotten a trip to the Islands out of it.”

She put her glass down on the table and looked at him. “Thanks,” she said.

“For what?” he asked, irritably innocent.

“Never mind.” She paused a moment and then asked, “Is Luis still in the Islands?”

“He said he’d be coming back to San Francisco sometime this month.” Miguel indicated the cars that were just now turning in the drive. “That could be he right now, couldn’t it?”

Becky threw back her head and laughed. “Mike, you can be such a little stinker when you want to be.”

“I come by it naturally. I come from a long line of stinkers.” The door-knock sounded before she could answer. He walked across the room and into the entryway to open the door.

“Spicko, you ol’ son of a bitch!” Tom Eubanks and a very disorganized girl stood on the step. Tom’s face was flushed and he held a bottle of Old Taylor in each hand. “Ollie told me your old man was in Mey-hee-coe so I rambled down as fast as Dottie Lamour here would let me. Say hello to the nice man, Miss Lamour. Honest, Spicko, she talks, drinks and dances—in fact she does everything but think. Don’t you, Miss Lamour?”

The girl was quite drunk, but pleasant about it. She put out a hand and said politely, “How do you do? I’m really not Dorothy Lamour. I wish I was. My name is Marybeth—that’s all one word. Marybeth Margulies. Isn’t that awful?”

Tom had caught sight of Becky still sitting by the fire. His eyes widened. “Oh, Jesus—I thought you were alone, Spick. I’m sorry as hell. Maybe we better amscray.”

Miguel took his arm and drew him inside. “To hell with that, Uncle. I haven’t seen you in a dog’s age—not since Albert and friends fixed SC’s wagon.”

“It never would have happened if I hadn’t been kept on the bench!” Tom began to sing in a very falsetto: “ ‘Fight on for old SC, the players want their salareee—’ Seriously, Mike. We aren’t busting in?”

“Of course not. Becky and I were sitting here boring each other.”

The second car drove in and parked behind Tom’s new Ford.

“Who’s with you, Uncle?” Miguel asked.

“Lawt Higby and some pig from Roble and the redoubtable Julian Trowbridge, Esquire and my own dear ex-love Floss the Hoss. The plan was, cousin, to have a par-tee. Maybe a dip in the moonlight.”

“In December?”

“Nor rain nor snow nor sleet nor gloom of night,” Tom said, cradling the two fifths of Old Taylor lovingly.

Julian and Lawt and the girls came tumbling in out of the dark. They were more sober than Tom but not much. Miguel led them into the living room.

“You know Lawt Higby and Julie,” Miguel said to Becky. “This is Miss Lamour—no, Margulies, wasn’t it? Florian, I think you know, too. And Lawt, you do your own honors. I’ll go get some glasses.” He stopped in mid-stride and turned to Becky. “Are you joining us? Or do the old folks turn in at seven-thirty like always?”

Becky’s eyes flashed angrily. “If you don’t mind, I’ll join you.”

Miguel, suddenly taken with an excited urge to bedevil Becky, said to the others, “We have to be particularly nice to the new owner.”

When Miguel returned with the glasses, soda siphon and an ice bucket, he noted that Becky had turned on the record player and was making his friends feel at home. That was a quality she had, and there was no denying it. She liked the company of young people and when she was among them you could forget that she was twenty-nine and you were only nineteen.

Miguel mixed a round of bourbon and sodas, remembering his father’s admonition about drinking and hell-raising while he was gone. The bourbon tasted particularly good tonight, he thought.

Miguel sat down next to Tom and Marybeth. “How’s the old leg, Uncle?” he asked. Tom had broken his leg in the Oregon game and had been sidelined for the season. He was particularly worried about it because he was at USC on an athletic scholarship.

“It still twinges me when the weather changes, pod’nuh,” Tom said. “And a south wind is sheerest hell.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously it’s serious. The sawbones isn’t sure I’ll be able to play again next year.”

“Football,” Julie Trowbridge said. “The world is flying apart and we take time to talk about football.”

“Julie is bucking for battery commander in the ROTC, Mrs. Rinehart,” Lawt Higby said to Becky. “He carries the world on his back.” He punched Miguel on the arm and said, “Your old roomie even keeps a war map in the house. How about that?”

“Maybe he’s studying to be a profiteer,” Miguel suggested, sipping his bourbon.

“You should have housebroken him better,” Higby said. “In fact, you should have pledged with us.”

Miguel indicated their surroundings with his half-full glass. “My presence was required here.”

“Oh, God,” Julie said beerily. “What difference does it all make, anyway?”

“Well, for heaven’s sake,” Marybeth broke out. “You act like 1 we’re in the war or something.”

Julie looked grim. “Aren’t we? Hasn’t that Anglophile in the

White House slipped us in without anyone knowing about it? You’ve heard about the Neutrality Patrol, I guess? Don’t tell me they aren’t dropping depth charges on the German submarines?”

“I shouldn’t be surprised if they are,” Miguel said mildly. “And bully for them.”

“Roger, roger,” Tom cried. “Bombs away! How about a refill, Spicko.”

“Help yourself,” Miguel said. He looked over at Becky. “Ready for another?”

Becky handed him her glass without a word and leaned back against the cushions of the couch.

Nobody wanted to talk about the international situation except Julian Trowbridge, but he was determined. “I hate to sound like a Cassandra, but believe me, it’s later than any of you guys think. We’ve had too many millstones draped around our necks now to get out of what’s coming. My dad says the Lend-Lease Act is the biggest sellout in history. For crying out loud, how can we be so stupid as to just give that stuff away? Did they ever pay their debts before? Hell, no. And they won’t this time either,” he concluded darkly.

“Julie,” Miguel said, “this is supposed to be a pleasant party. Not a wake for fifty tired old destroyers we didn’t even know we had.”

“That’s right,” Tom said gaily. “I didn’t know we had ’em. Nobody told me.” He turned the volume up on the radio-phonograph. “Hey, listen. ‘A String of Pearls’—oh, that Miller boy!” He walked over to Becky and asked her to dance. Miguel saw to his surprise that she stood up and accepted.

“Watch that game leg,” Miguel said.

“Spicko, I can’t feel a thing,” Tom said, prancing happily.

Miguel watched for a few minutes. Becky seemed to be enjoying it. Lawt Higby and the Roble girl were dancing too now.

Florian came over to Miguel and said, “Dance with me?”

Miguel finished his drink and danced.

“I haven’t seen you all year.”

“I’ve been busy as hell,” he said, watching Tom and Becky.

He was thinking about what Becky would say if she knew that the money she had given him last year had gone to Tom. After actually giving him the money, she had never mentioned the incident again. He had almost hoped, with a strange sort of perversity, that she would tell his father. The desire to outrage was still as strong as ever in Miguel. But Becky had done nothing of the sort. She had simply given him the money and kept quiet about it. So he had passed it on to Tom and that was the end of it.

He realized that Flossie had been talking steadily while he had been watching Becky and Tom. He hadn’t any notion of what she was talking about.

“I said,” Florian exclaimed testily, “I’d love another drink.”

‘Tm sorry, Floss,” Miguel said. “Right away.”

She followed him to the buffet table where he had put the liquor. “Really, I wish you wouldn’t call me that.”

“Floss?”

“My name is Florian.”

“It’s a beautiful name,” Julie Trowbridge said heavily.

“Your glass, Julie?” Miguel asked.

Julian put his glass down and asked Florian to dance. She hesitated a moment and then glided away with him. Miguel poured himself a drink and took it down neat, shuddering a bit. He had decided to get high tonight. Raoul would be home tomorrow. For some reason the idea depressed him.

Tom and Becky stopped by him as the record changed. Tom had evidently been telling Becky about his work in the blister rust control camps, explaining the life cycle of the parasites that caused the ugly swellings on the conifers. “We have to dig up all the rybee bushes—that breaks the chain or some damn thing,” he said. “I didn’t know there were so many rybee bushes in California. There must be billions and billions.”

Miguel said, “The Department of Athletics did better by you this summer.”

“He means I got paid for cleaning the goat pens at the bio labs during summer quarter,” Tom said to Becky. To Miguel he added, “Well, I didn’t kill myself working, Spicko, and that’s a fact.”

Miguel watched Becky. Her eyes were half closed and she swayed slightly in time to the music. “Dance, Becky?” he asked.

She felt very strange and exciting in his arms. The song was a Lunceford of “I Don’t Want to Cry Any More,” with a full unmuted trumpet carrying the melody against Lunceford’s solid rhythm section.

“This is the first time I’ve ever danced with you,” Miguel said.

Becky did not reply. She danced well. It seemed that she pressed every inch of herself against him. Occasionally, her knee would slip between his legs and he could feel the softness of the inside of her thigh. He was beginning to conjure a strange fantasy in his mind.

Lawt Higby danced by holding a drink in his hand. “What became of Allie Wylie, Mike?” he asked. “We never see her around any more.”

Miguel said nothing. He glanced down at Becky. She seemed not to have heard.

It was a long while now since Miguel had made any effort to find out anything about Allie. He wasn’t welcome at the Wylie house and he had no other way of knowing. The bitter taste was in his mouth again.

He stopped dancing and said to Becky, “Let’s have another drink.”

“I don’t think I want any more.”

“You aren’t feeling them, for chrissake,” he said roughly.

She gazed at him with a confused expression in her eyes. What was she seeing, he wondered violently, a nineteen-year-old punk or just another Rinehart man?

“Come on,” he said. “I need one.”

He mixed himself a stiff, dark highball. Across the room he could hear Tom and Julie arguing extravagantly. Tom said, “Oh, Christ on a crutch, Julie—take off your Willkie button and relax, will you? He lost, that’s all, he talked himself hoarse …”

Marybeth said, “I’m sorry he didn’t get to be President. He seemed to want to be so much.”

“The Germans have made the same mistake Napoleon did ” Higby said loudly. “Nobody can lick those Russians.”

“They seem to be doing a fine job of it right now,” Julie said, heatedly defending his position as a gloom-merchant.

“Ho, for the Arsenal of Demo-crassy,” Tom shouted, laughing.

It all came too late to help poor old Anson, Miguel thought, suddenly sentimental.

“The country has been fed on a diet of sensationalism for so long were helpless without it,” Julian said.

“Poly Sci 105,” Miguel said. “A direct quote from Dr. Harnett.”

“That bastion of reaction,” Higby cried.

“Don’t you call pore ol’ Julie’s friends bastions,” Tom grumbled. “His pa and ma were probably as married as yours or mine.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Julian said exasperatedly. “A person can’t say anything.”

“Is it true that Stanford is the Hah-vahd of the west?” Tom asked Julie.

“Harvard is the Stanford of the east,” Higby declared.

The girl from Roble broke her silence with a shrill little laugh, like the cry of a baby hyena.

Tom said soberly, “But Stanford girls are such pigs.”

Marybeth said, “Honestly, Tommy.”

Miguel watched Becky, wondering if she felt out of things. She was saying nothing at all. It occurred to him quite suddenly that she was drunk. It really didn’t take much. He felt his drinks himself. God, he thought, Raoul would blow a fuse if he could see Becky drinking with us like this.

Tom and Lawt Higby were beginning to harmonize on the Roslyn School Hymn. Miguel listened with illogical irritation. How Tom could get along so easily with people was something he couldn’t understand. People like Lawt, who really disliked him. Nothing seemed to bother Tom much. The bastard had a skin two inches thick.

He walked to the window and stood there looking at the wintry night. He felt sodden.

Tom yelled to him, “Hey, Spicko, what do you hear from (Minder?”

Miguel shook his head. He had sent Olinder three short stories and asked him if he thought he should try to sell them to Esquire or the Post and Olinder had sent them back to him with a note that said: “A student of mine can do better than this.” And he had torn the manuscripts up and hadn’t written anything since. The trouble was that he knew Olinder was right. He’d known about what to expect even before he sent the stories.

“I want out,” he said to himself.

“What did you say?” Becky was standing beside him, her voice was all soft and warm-sounding.

“I said I want to get the hell away.”

“From what?”

“From Dad. From here.” He looked down at her angrily. “From you, I guess.”

She shook her head slowly. “Don’t say things like that.”

Almost of its own volition, his hand found hers and they stood together at the window, apart from the others, holding hands.

“Becky,” he said, moved by an incomprehensible urge to confession. “I’ve been flying.” Why did I tell her that, he wondered. “I thought you might be,” she said.

“I want to go up to Canada and join the RCAF.”

Her hand tightened on his. “No, Mike.”

“I told you I wanted to get out of here.”

“Don’t do that, Mike. It would kill your father.”

My father, he thought. My father and your husband and you stand here holding hands with me and tell me this—He had the notion he might simply be going a little crazy and this wasn’t really happening the way he thought it was at all. Maybe she was still Luis’s wife. Maybe she was really Allie in that dirndl. Maybe none of the things that had happened since the night Sandy died were real. I’m crazy, he thought. I’m drunk. Or both.

The others had quieted down somewhat. Tom was dancing with Florian and Higby with Marybeth. Julie and the Roble girl were sitting on the floor watching the fire die down.

Becky said softly, “Don’t be unhappy, Mike.” She put her arms up to him and he had an impulse to forget everything with her and let himself go completely and see what would happen. Instead, they started dancing, not moving much.

“I shouldn’t feel this way,” Becky said thickly. “I’m awfully tight”

“I won’t tell on you, Ma,” he said sarcastically.

“Why do you have to be like that?”

“Like what?”

“Nasty,” she said, and pressed herself against him.

They danced for a long while. Presently Tom came up and said, “We have to get going, Spicko.”

“Already?”

“It’s damn near midnight. Have to drive all the way back to the city. Give me a blast tomorrow, will you?”

“You staying with the folks?”

“What else?”

“When are we heading for Canada, Tom?”

“You’re not kidding about that, are you?” Tom glanced at Becky. “Is the winged secret out?”

“She knows I’ve been flying,” Miguel said.

Tom said to Becky, “He’s crazy.”

“I know,” she said.

Tom looked from her to Miguel and then he said, “Okay, take it easy.” He called Marybeth and Higby. “On your feet, one and all. Uncle Sam needs you.”

They trooped out the door singing and yelling and when they had gone there was an empty stillness left in the room. The music was still playing.

Miguel said, “Want to dance some more?”

Becky looked at him for a moment and then shook her head, wrapping her arms around herself as though she felt a sudden chill. “We’d better get things straightened up,” she said.

Miguel helped her pick up the glasses and the empty bottles. They carried them into the kitchen. Becky washed and dried the glasses in a tense silence. She wouldn’t look at him. “Want some coffee?” she asked.

“Sure.”

She brushed against him as she reached for the percolator and pulled away as though she had touched something white-hot.

Miguel reached out and caught her shoulder. He was angry, boiling over with unexplainable rage. He spun her around to face him, holding her by the upper arms. Her flesh felt moist under his hands.

Her head rocked back, her eyes were rolled back so that the white showed under the iris. Her mouth looked warm and slack.

“Oh, God, no—” she said.

He pulled her against him and kissed her, hard, so that his teeth crushed her lips. For a moment she was limp against him and then, as though an electric current had raced through her body, she responded.

He kept his eyes open so that he could see her face. He hated her and loved her all at once and he wanted to inflict both pain and pleasure on her. He reached under her skirt, lifting it and slipping her underthings down in a swift, determined movement. His hands kneaded the flesh of her buttocks and searched the small of her back, holding her against him with all his strength. She fought for breath, but he kept his mouth hard on hers, stabbing with his tongue. He heard her dress rip and his hands found her breasts and belly. He handled every part of her while she writhed against him. Her responses were tidal, moon-driven heavings and moanings.

She broke away from him and stood for a moment, her hand on her bruised mouth, her dress caught up around her waist so that he could see her belly heaving as she gasped for breath. Her eyes were wild, black, cavernous. Her dress was torn off one shoulder and her breast looked pounded, bruised.

She turned and ran out of the kitchen and across the living room. He heard the door to her bedroom slam. He leaned back against the sink, half-stunned and undecided.

Presently he turned off the kitchen light and walked into the living room, turning off the lights there, too. He sat down before the embers of the fire and smoked a cigarette. His mind was washed of thought. The satisfaction of his body seemed the only thing worth having. His hatred of her was a deep, visceral thing and he could think of nothing but her body.

He stood up and walked slowly to her room. The door was closed. He tried the knob, expecting to find it locked. But the door opened into a black, humid cave smelling of women’s things, powder and perfume and the musk of sex.

He walked in. In the darkness he could hear breathing. His foot touched something soft, the feel and slickness of silk.

“Becky—”

He heard her whimper something. She was beyond speech and the murky anger inside him grew again.

He stood for what seemed a long time, poised over her. He could hear her burying her sobs in the pillow.

Reaction hit him in a drenching wave. He felt as though he were going to be sick standing there in the dark. He lost orientation and the room whirled nauseously about him. He thought of Maria and La Roja and all the women that had been his father’s women. Desire drained out of him and left him weak and shuddering. He turned and stumbled from the room. He slammed the door behind him with such violence that he heard a picture fall and glass shatter inside.

He went back to the living room and threw himself on the couch. He was racked by dry, painful spasms. He rolled over and pressed his face against the rough cloth of the armrest.

Raoul found him there that way in the morning. The morning of December 7,1941.

SIXTEEN

Time was running out now, Miguel thought. He looked at his wristwatch. Four o’clock. He couldn’t remember whether or not he had set it ahead in Chicago. Well, it didn’t really matter too much. Right now time wasn’t measured in minutes and hours for him, but in miles.

A late moon had risen behind the airliner, silvering the wings and the thin line of the stabilizer just back of Miguel’s window. The murky weather was far east of them now and below lay the vasty white expanses of the Great Salt Lake, pale as an icefield in the moonlight.

He wondered if Karl had read any of the script yet and what he thought of it. He would probably say, “A student of mine can do better than this.” Miguel succumbed to a swelling tide of frustration. Perhaps Karl would be right, but it was so nearly impossible now for him to write decently that the very fear of complete failure might keep him from working.

The stewardess walked quietly down the aisle between the sleeping passengers. She stopped and said, “What, still awake?”

“Macbeth hath murdered sleep,” he said. “Dramamine doesn’t work on me.”

She knelt in the aisle and handed him his book. “I brought it back. Be sure to keep it.”

He took it and slipped it into his pocket. “I’m chained to it,” he said. “It’s my bread and butter.”

“Do you want anything? Some coffee? Cocoa?”

“Ovaltine, Sanka, or brown celery phosphate?”

She giggled softly and said, “I’ll leave you alone.”

He watched her walk back up the aisle and disappear into the front cabin.

It wouldn’t be too long before they were past Elko and then Reno. Then under them would be Donner Summit. God, he wanted to be asleep by the time they passed Donner. That was where Tom had left his legs.

It could have been better for him all along, Miguel thought if he hadn’t tagged along with me. But it had started too long ago, maybe with that scuffle in the dirt at the Russian River, or before that. In some odd way he had established a claim on Tom that had eventually led to destruction the way such claims always did.

What Billy Alberg had said so long ago about Miguel owning Tom was probably true. Tom had come down from Moses Lake to see the Cal-USC game and had tied one on with Billy and that’s about what he had said. Tom had also gone to see Raoul, Miguel remembered. And that was about the time Raoul had been working like crazy to get Miguel transferred out of a hot fighter outfit into Kirbee’s headquarters in San Francisco.

Billy had also said, the night Miguel met Alaine, that Tom had not liked flying. That he had gone into the Air Corps simply because Miguel had.

Miguel frowned, thinking that it was a responsibility he had never wanted. It was bad enough to accept the blame for your own destruction, let alone someone else’s. But if the years taught you anything at all it was that you couldn’t live in an egocentric universe without being responsible for the things that happened in it.

Miguel knew that he had run from an intolerable situation at home that winter of 1941-42. A situation largely of his own making. There was no escaping that conclusion. Becky couldn’t be blamed. She was one of those women born to please men. Physically. In another age she would have been a successful courtesan. She could never have achieved the stature of a Pompadour or a Sorel, of course, because she had a small mind. But she was perfect, he told himself, for the aging man of flagging vitality. In all respects, save one. She had too much genuine sensuality in her make-up. She was too sincere a libertine.

In many respects Becky and Nora were alike. But there was nothing small about Nora’s mind. She was quick, intelligent, and she had a quality of ruthlessness that Becky’s limited point of view denied her. Becky’s inept acquisitiveness could never be dignified with the name of true ruthlessness.

So I ran, Miguel thought. And I dragged Tom with me. Because of me, Tom became a flier, and because he was a flier, he had a weapon in his hand to turn against himself.

Miguel ran a hand over his eyes and looked out at the moonlit wilderness below. Tom was a moralist. He never should have married Nora.

And if Tom was a moralist, where, Miguel wondered, did that leave him. Like Nora and like Becky—yes, like Raoul, an amoralist to his fingertips. The Mendelian law applied perfectly. Heredity was wonderful.

He closed his eyes and prayed for sleep.

What good did it do to dwell on these things? Could you undo the past? Why not keep it simple, the way the Army did?

They gave me a medal, he thought, and a pat on the back for being a good, strong, self-sacrificing American soldier. They gave me their approval. And isn’t that what I always wanted? So the price was high. Isn’t it always?

On May 1, 1945, while the delegates of fifty nations were meeting in the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco to create a charter for something called the UNO, another, smaller meeting was taking place on the second floor of the Spanish-California style Administration Building at Hamilton Army Air Base.

The five senior officers were headed by Colonel L. M. Holman, who tapped for order with the hand that had been crippled by Jap infantry fire on Bataan before he had flown out in one of the last remaining P-40s.

There was an observer there from Western Defense Command and from General Kirbee’s headquarters, too, because Kirbee’s aide was involved.

Holman had been questioning Miguel closely on the condition of the aircraft before take-off and through the early part of the flight, and finally he came to the point with the direct question Miguel had been expecting.

“Can you offer any opinion as to why both propellers were in extreme coarse pitch—that is to say, nearly feathered—when the wreckage was inspected, Lieutenant Rinehart?”

A shaft of sunlight from a high window made a pattern of superimposed crosses at Miguel’s feet as he stood at attention and lied. “No, sir. Unless there was a simultaneous failure in the hydraulic system, sir.”

One of the officers, a command pilot with fifteen thousand hours of military flying behind him, murmured, “Extremely unlikely.”

It was unlikely. It was so unlikely as to be virtually impossible. But there was that doubt. It could have been mechanical failure, and there were only two persons who knew it hadn’t been. The truth would serve no purpose here.

“In your inspection of the airplane before take-off, you saw no evidence of tampering, Lieutenant?” one of the Board members asked.

“I wouldn’t have taken the ship up if I had, sir.”

“The crew chief was a Sergeant Lippo, I believe. He was on furlough at the time of the mission and the aircraft was in the hands of the assistant. Is that correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then it is possible that the airplane was not airworthy and neither you nor Lieutenant Eubanks discovered the fact until the time of the accident?”

“The ship was on red diagonal, sir. But we could have missed something internal. Something that isn’t ordinarily on the pilot’s check list,” Miguel said. “But if this is so, the responsibility was entirely mine. As airplane commander I should have caught any defect.” Except, of course, that there hadn’t been any defect. The airplane had been airworthy. It had been her crew that had broken down.

Colonel Holman looked around at the members of the Board and said, “Any further questions? If not, that will be all, Lieutenant.”

And Miguel had saluted, about-faced, and walked straight to the officers’ club to drink himself into a stupor.

But no matter how much liquor he poured into himself, he wasn’t going to forget it. The way Tom looked, what Tom said, the strangely light weight of him.

Then Nora had gone away south. “There is nothing more for me here,” was the way she put it. It didn’t help much to tell yourself that Nora was all of a piece—that she was unswervingly selfish and ambitious. Her desertion wasn’t easy to minimize.

At the station, before boarding the Lark, she told Miguel, “I can’t force you to leave Alaine. But you’ll come to me eventually, because you have to, darling. What Tom told you on the mountain is true.”

People watched them saying good-by. What did they see, Miguel wondered. Simply a soldier and a pretty girl?

And as a final irony, having perjured himself to a Board of Inquiry, instead of the court martial he deserved, they had decorated him with a Soldier’s Medal for saving Tom’s life.

Nine days before the crash and a month after that day at Stinson Beach with Nora, on April 2, 1945, Miguel met Tom in Base Operations. Tom wanted to talk and Miguel didn’t, but they left the field together and stopped at Le Château on the highway for a drink because Miguel couldn’t think of any way to get out of it.

Miguel had been begging Colonel Holman for a transfer into one of the new Northrop Black Widow squadrons forming for night fighter and intruder work at Salinas and Fresno. But Holman wasn’t anxious to reassign General Kirbee’s personal pilot to combat duty. Miguel’s requests for transfer were stolidly refused.

Nora had been making increasing demands on his time since that day at Stinson Beach. He hated the petty deceits, the constant lying to Alaine, the back-road trips—all of it. But it was the way it had to be.

The worst of it was facing Tom, and Tom not knowing. It made Miguel feel dirty and trapped.

They ordered rum Cokes because that was about all they could get. Tom looked tired and overwrought. Miguel never remembered seeing him this way.

“Did you see the paper last night?” Tom asked.

“I was in Chico last night with Major Durst,” Miguel said.

“Ella got picked up for drunken driving. She smashed up the old man’s car.”

“Jesus, Tom,” Miguel said, concerned. “Was she hurt?”

The dim bar lights gleamed on Tom’s insignia. Miguel thought suddenly that Tom had never looked at home in a uniform. He belonged in corduroy trousers and a sweat shirt—with TE loves Nora on the back? God, why did he have to think that right now, he wondered.

“No,” Tom said. “Ella wasn’t.”

“Oliver?”

Tom made a sour face. “Oliver wasn’t with her. It was some baldhead son of a bitch commander from Western Sea Frontier.”

Miguel could think of nothing to say. It had always been that way with Ella Eubanks. The wonder of it was that she could still keep it up at her age.

“How would you like to have a pushover for an old lady, Spick?” Tom asked bitterly.

“Don’t be rough on her, Tom,” Miguel said.

“And a rumpot for a father?”

“Tom—”

“Look, I can make plain talk with you, can’t I? You, of all people?”

Miguel nodded, not meeting his eyes.

“Oh, it’s okay. Oliver bailed her out of jail and the swivel-chair admiral is just shaken up a bit and his reputation shot. But goddam it, why does it have to be that way?”

“Another drink?”

Tom slid his glass over and Miguel ordered again. It was early and the place was quiet. The instruments squatted mutely on the garishly painted bandstand. Le Château was better patronized by AAF people than the officers’ club and the USO combined, but the crowd didn’t start coming in until after six. Tom said abruptly, “Nora’s got the hot pants for somebody.” Miguel felt an icy wave wash over him. He waited tensely for Tom to go on.

“Raunchy bitch that she is,” Tom said, “she can’t hide it. Some lousy bastard is giving her the prong.”

“You could be imagining it,” Miguel said carefully, not meeting Tom’s eye.

“Imagine it, hell. I know what it is when she comes in heat for it. I ought to, don’t you think?”

“I suppose so,” Miguel said. “Look, you don’t want to tell me all this.”

“I don’t? Listen, Spick, I’m going flap-happy with that little bee buzzing around in my head. You should see the way she acts around the apartment. Love, love, it’s wonderful. She as much as told me she was screwing around. Goddam it, Spick, why do I always have to get mixed up with tramps?”

“Tom, I don’t want to hear all this,” Miguel said, getting up. “Sit down, for chrissake. Let me get some of this off my chest, won’t you?”

Miguel sat down again in strained silence.

“How’s Alaine getting on?” Tom asked.

“All right. As well as could be expected, I guess. The doctor says she might have a rough time when the baby is born.”

“That’s a damn fine woman you’ve got, Spick.”

“Yes.”

“Did I ever tell you how I met Nora?”

Miguel shook his head. He didn’t want to know. He wished Tom would stop talking about it.

“I had a seventy-two-hour leave. I walked into a joint in the city called The Bird of Paradise—in the International Settlement—you know it?”

“No.”

“It’s not your sort of place. I used to take Marybeth Margulies there before the war. You remember her.”

“Yes.” Miguel’s conversation had degenerated to curt monosyllables, but Tom took no notice.

“Nora was talking to the barkeep about a job. She was damn near in tears. Wanted to be a cocktail waitress, a bus girl—anything. The guy gave her the big no because she looked under age. I don’t know, Spick. For the first damn time in my life, I felt sorry for somebody. I really did. I tried to buy her a drink but the guy said no to that too. So I took her with me down to Tadich’s and we had dinner. Big soft-headed Eubanks being a knight in shining armor. I bought her a meal and then we went dancing at the snakepit in the Sir Francis—and by two o’clock I thought I’d found something pretty special. She told me what a hell of a time she had at home, and how she wanted to get away. That much was true. I met her old man once and he’s a no-good bastard. Anyway, we spent the night together and in the morning we got on a plane to Reno. The next night was the night we met you and Alberg at the Mark.”

Miguel sat in silence, his hand clenched around his glass. That wasn’t exactly the way he’d heard it from Nora. She had told him Pete Wallace introduced them at the Empire Skyroom.

Tom said, “She sure married into the right family. Ella could give her lessons.”

“Tom, knock this off,” Miguel said sharply.

“I thought I found something good,” Tom said. “Isn’t that a laugh?”

“Nora’s all right,” Miguel said.

Tom shook his head. His face looked gray. “I’m pretty near the end of my rope, Spick. Holman said something to me yesterday about my last trip to Tonopah. A mag went bad on the goddam C-45 and I started to break up into little pieces. The crew chief was ready to go over the side on me and he complained to Holman.”

“You’re working yourself into a sweat over nothing,” Miguel said in a flat, hard voice.

“Like hell. If they take me off flying status, what then? I need the flight pay. Nora needs it, goddam her.”

“Nobody’s taking you off flying status.”

Tom looked bleakly at Miguel and said, “I wish they would. I just wish the goddam hell they would.”

Miguel said nothing. He was thinking of what Billy Alberg had told him about Tom’s fear of flying.

“I’m scared green, Spick,” Tom said miserably. “And I’m tired of being scared. When I was with the fighters up north I damn near died every time I had to take a Lightning up. I’ve never said this to anyone, but I can say it to you. I’ve been sweating blood ever since Primary. I thought sure they’d wash me out and that would be the end of it, but goddam it, they didn’t. I’ve got co-ordination, good eyes, quick reactions, and a yellow streak a foot wide down the middle of my back—”

Miguel looked at Tom. There was a gleam of perspiration on his forehead and the collar of his khaki shirt looked too tight. “Why didn’t you just quit, Tom? You could have—any time. You didn’t have to keep on with it.”

“How could I quit, for chrissake? The one thing Oliver has to be proud of is the fact that his Thomas is a pilot just like he used to be. I couldn’t just fluff it off, Spick. I figured if I tried my best and still couldn’t cut it, well, okay—that would be the end of it. But it didn’t work that way.” He paused to light a cigarette with a hand that was not completely steady. “And it isn’t that I’m afraid of dying, Spick. It isn’t just that. I’m scared I’ll foul up. I’m afraid of doing something stupid—oh, Jesus, I don’t know.”

Miguel said slowly, “Do you think it would help any if we flew together for a while?”

“You mean you and me?”

Miguel nodded, feeling more and more enmeshed by the moment. “I’ve been flying with Pete Wallace mostly. But Pete’s getting a flight in a Liberator outfit soon. Ill have to have a copilot for trips in the B-25.”

‘Tm not checked out,” Tom said.

“That’s no trouble. I’ll talk to Colonel Holman.”

“Jesus, Spick—”

“I’ll do it if you think it will help any,” Miguel said, false and soiled.

Tom held on to his arm with one hand and tapped his shoulder with a clenched fist. “It’s good to know there is one son of a bitch in the world you can trust,” he said thickly.

Miguel turned his face away and said, “Sure. Now how about one for the road?”

Miguel did not go home until late that night. Instead he got drunk.

They refused to serve him any more at the Top o’ the Mark and he went across the street to the Fairmont and didn’t have any better luck there. He ended up in the International Settlement.

At ten o’clock he could get nothing more to drink from the barkeep because of the curfew for servicemen. Sergeant Chavez, the Flight Section clerk, and Lieutenant Wallace found him standing on the corner of Columbus and Pacific.

“Alaine has been calling the section all evening,” Pete Wallace said. “We’ll give you a lift home.”

“You better come with us, Lieutenant,” Chavez said. “This place is crawling with MPs.”

“I’ve been communing with the Great CO,” Miguel said. “Up Yonder.”

“Sure. Come on, airplane driver. Home,” Pete said.

“Honest, sir. The MPs are thick.”

“Up Yonder,” Miguel said. “Shove it, Sergeant. Up Yonder.”

“Nora Eubanks has been looking for you, too,” Pete said.

“Blow it out your wobble pump, Lieutenant.”

“Come on, sir,” Chavez said.

“Sergeant,” Miguel said. “What are you doing here? You shouldn’t fraternize with drunken flying officers. It will spoil all your illusions.”

“All right, sir. I’ll try to do better. Shall I call a cab, Lieutenant Wallace?”

Miguel sat down on the curb and said, “I have to report to the Great CO. Up Yonder. I had my orders cut this afternoon.”

“Sure,” Lieutenant Wallace said. “Call the cab, sarge.”

Miguel put his face in his hands and tried to cry. He couldn’t. Chavez and Pete Wallace took him home.

On April 11, 1945 Tom and Miguel were ordered to take the Mitchell over the mountains and pick up an inspection team at the training base at Tonopah.

The morning was bright and clear over Hamilton Field, but there were thunderstorms over the Sierra Nevada. Miguel filed the flight plan for an 0800 hours ETD, hoping to beat the weather, but Tom was late. And because he was edgy and anxious to be on the way, Miguel had racked Tom back a bit, never noticing that Tom was pale and sullen and not himself.

They climbed through the belly hatch of the B-25 and into the cockpit. Miguel slipped into the left-hand seat and Tom into the right.

“Okay,” Miguel said. “Let’s go with the check list.”

Tom held the plastic-coated sheet in his hand and read off the items in a flat, hard voice. Miguel could lose himself in the ritual of flying, and he did so now, touching or setting each control as Tom read from the list.

“Battery cart?”

Miguel glanced outside to see if the cart was connected and the line chief gave him a four-oh.

“Cart connected.”

“Master switch?”

“On.”

“Cross feed and gas?”

“On. Reserve tank.”

“Mixtures?”

“Idle cutoff.”

“Prop pitch?”

“High RPM.”

“Cowl flaps?”

“Open.”

It was a litany as natural in question and response as breathing. “Superchargers?”

“Low blower.”

“Hydraulic pressure?”

Miguel checked the wobble pump. The pressure indicators came to life. “Check.”

“Trim?”

“Set for take-off.”

“Generators?”

“Off.”

“Autopilot?”

“Off.”

“Gyros caged?”

“Check.”

“That’s it.”

Miguel opened the cockpit window and shouted to the crewman standing on the ramp with the firebottle. “Clear left!”

He engaged the starter and the big propeller blades rotated jerkily until the engine caught with a puff of blue oil smoke from the exhaust. He moved the mixture control to Auto-rich and set the idle. He motioned to Tom to watch his side and started the starboard engine.

“Call the tower,” he said.

Tom got the take-off clearance and they taxied the Mitchell out to the end of the concrete mat. Miguel swung the ship to a forty-five-degree angle with the take-off line and set the parking brake. He began the engine run-up and Tom checked the magnetos without being told.

“Okay,” Miguel said. “Get the list again.”

Tom held the check list. His knuckles were white and there was a set tenseness around his mouth. Miguel said impatiently, “Come on, read it out.”

“Flaps?”

“Set for take-off.”

“Cylinder head temperature?”

“Check.”

“Hydraulic pressure, fuel pressure?”

“Normal.”

“Gyros?”

“Uncaged and set. That does it,” Miguel said. “You want the take-off?”

Tom looked away and shook his head.

“Go on,” Miguel said. “Ill check you.”

Tom’s eyes were flinty. “I said I didn’t want it!”

Miguel said, “What’s browned you off this morning?”

Tom said nothing. He turned his face to the cockpit window. The tower was telling them to clear the runway for a pair of B-24s in the landing pattern. Miguel squared the Mitchell away and opened the throttles.

He couldn’t worry about Tom right now. The problems of flight were his only concern.

As the bomber became airborne, he signaled Tom to raise the gear. Tom did nothing. Miguel shot him a look and raised the wheels himself.

He milked up the flaps alone, too, and banked the Mitchell out of the pattern and into a long, shallow climb to the east.

The sun sparkled on the water of San Pablo Bay. Oil storage tanks, like silver pillboxes, dotted the Richmond shore. Ahead and below lay the intricate, mechano-set cantilever span of the Carquinez Bridge. To the left lay the orderly confusion of gray ships at Mare Island. Luis had been into Mare Island only last week, but Miguel had missed him because he had been on a flight to Dallas. He had called home to see if Becky or Raoul had seen him, but Luis hadn’t gone home at all. And now he was out again with a new ship somewhere. He was a full commander now. His shipmates thought him an iron-ass. There was talk that he had turned down the post of assistant naval attache in Madrid. If it was true, Miguel thought, it was because Luis thought Raoul had something to do with it.

At 5,000 feet, Miguel shook Tom’s shoulder and said, “You take it now.”

Tom knocked Miguel’s hand away.

Miguel was conscious of a tiny bead, cold and hurtful, solidifying in his belly. Tom had heard the talk. There could be no other explanation for his action. For a moment, Miguel considered turning back to the field. But what reason could he give Colonel Holman for wanting to leave Tom on the ground?

“Tom,” Miguel said.

“Fly the goddam airplane and shut up,” Tom said. His face was gray, his lips bloodless.

They flew in silence. The bomber climbed into the still, blue air. Miguel sat mute, his hands on the control wheel, his feet on the rudder pedals. Surely there was something that needed to be said—some apology to lessen the tension.

There was nothing. He knew himself to be hopelessly enmeshed in a situation beyond his control now. He remembered the days on the river, the years at Roslyn, the times and places he had shared with Tom. I had a friend, he thought. I had one. Period. Past tense. Stupid, stupid son of a bitch. Was any woman worth this? He thought of Nora, of her little cries of passion, the way she arched herself against you, the thrust of her hips against you with those pelvic bones like satin-covered blades—

Tom’s hands lay in his lap, clenching and unclenching. Miguel could see a muscle twitching in his cheek. What would I be thinking right now? Miguel wondered. I’d want to kill someone.

Miguel pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes and blinked at the spears of glaring sunlight reflecting from the polished aluminum skin of the nose section.

Anson said, he was thinking, if you want to be a writer, kid, you have to really live—God, is that what he had been doing for so long? Then Brutus, Absalom and Judas must have been pretty damned good and how come they didn’t ever write anything?

When David wanted Bathsheba he at least had the decency to send Uriah out to be killed. I’ve made him my co-pilot, Miguel thought. What the goddam hell am I thinking about anyway, Tom’s just in a mood—he doesn’t know anything—

The valley below was dappled with scattered clouds. The twisting delta of the Sacramento River gave way to ordered farmlands, speckled with shadows. The city of Sacramento itself lay hidden under a solid stratus deck that gave way to tumbled cumulus over the foothills and then soared high to join the picket line of cumulo-nimbus over the high crests. The thunder-heads reached almost to thirty thousand; their anvilheads flaking off into mare’s tails of ice in the dark blue of the tropopause.

Miguel tuned in the Sacramento Range and asked for the Donner Summit weather. A woman’s voice came back through the headphones.

“Army 3209, this is Sacramento Radio—” Miguel could picture her sitting before her microphone in a striped white-and-orange shack planted on the dark soil of the central valley and the four tall antennae pointing like bayonets at the lowering skies. “Donner Summit reports two hundred feet and two miles intermittent in snow flurries. Wind west two one miles with gusts to three oh. Altimeter two nine nine nine. What is your position, 3209?”

“Army 3209 one five miles south of your station on top at angels one one. We will not be able to remain in contact, Sacramento. Please notify Air Traffic Control and Army Airways we are changing to instrument flight rules. Over.”

“Wilco, 3209. Sacramento Radio out.”

Ahead of them the undercast was rising swiftly to meet their track. Miguel pulled the Mitchell’s nose into a climb again. The weather was building up heavily ahead. Miguel decided to try to pick his way through the thunderheads, avoiding them when he could, and bulling it through when evasion was impossible. It was safe enough in a good airplane, but it would be rough. He could see the swirls of dirty gray as they flew into the shadow of the clouds.

Miguel turned to Tom. “You all right?”

“Don’t worry about me. Worry about yourself.”

Miguel studied Toms face and it was the fight at the river all over again. “All right,” he said. “We’ll go ahead.”

The bomber plunged into the wall of storm at two hundred and sixty miles an horn:.

There came that familiar rustle of rain and hail on the metal skin of the airplane. St. Elmo’s Fire glowed on the propeller tips. The turbulence of the air grew severe and Miguel heard Tom gasp as they banged through some sharp vertical gusts. The horizons disappeared and the world went dark gray. Moisture streaked the windscreen and began to freeze there.

A brilliant electric-blue lightning flash burned the sky, leaving black and red afterimages in the eyes.

A downdraft caught them and they dropped four hundred feet in the space of a heartbeat. Almost immediately, they flew into the compensating updraft with the port wing. The airplane pitched up to a fifty-degree bank before Miguel could fight it level again. Miguel could feel protest in every rivet as the massive forces of the thundercloud ripped at the airframe.

His hands were sweaty under his flying gloves and his back and shoulders ached. The flight instruments were gyrating and the storm sizzled and crackled in his headphones.

He called over to Tom, “Put some of your muscle on this wheel and give me a hand till we get through.”

Tom shook his head slowly. Miguel looked at him and made a sudden decision. There was a glazed look in Tom’s eyes. He wasn’t right. They had to go back. It had been idiotic to come this far. He should have known Tom was ready to break wide open.

Tom said something Miguel couldn’t hear.

“What? What did you say?”

“Why did it have to be you?” Tom yelled suddenly. “Why did it have to be you, you son of a bitch?”

“Shut up, Tom,” Miguel said sharply, his eyes on the instrument turn to get them out of the storm and into calmer air. He’d make some excuse for landing at Sacramento. Tom’s frame of mind was a danger to them both.

Suddenly, Tom sensed his decision and unfastened his safety belt. Before Miguel realized what he was doing he had reached up and pressed both feathering buttons. It was as though the airplane had slammed into a brick wall. The engine RPM dropped sharply, the engines detonated fiercely as they labored against the coarsening pitch of the propeller blades.

The bomber lost speed, mushed sickeningly. Miguel banged the nose down hard to prevent a sudden stall. They dove out of the overcast into a narrow valley. Miguel caught a glimpse of a narrow strip of highway, of snow-dusted conifers. He heard himself yelling, “You crazy bastard, what do you think you’re doing—” Tom was slack-faced, all the fight gone out of him. Miguel slammed the throttles and pitch controls against the stops. There was a lurching roar from the motors. Clouds closed in around them momentarily and then Miguel saw a flash of gray rocks. Something banged against the underside of the fuselage. He thought: This is absurd my God we’re going to smash into the goddam mountain—

He slapped at the switches and tried to get the flaps down. Tips of trees began scraping along the belly with a hollow, tearing noise. Miguel heaved his weight against the wheel, trying to lift the airplane over the mass of green to reach a snowy firebreak ahead.

All he could think of was Sandy, Sandy blazing like a torch and screaming—

There was a series of sharp cracks, distinct as pistol shots as the airplane angled down through the treetops, snapping them off like matchsticks. The white earth rushed at them. Miguel felt the belly strike. The propellers bent crazily back over the nacelles. There was an oscillating, rolling movement and visibility was gone in a shower of flying snow and ice. There was a thunderous boom as a heavier tree tore a wing from the fuselage. Icy air rushed through the ruptured cockpit. Miguel felt a knife-blade slice across his abdomen and he pitched forward against the control wheel and the instrument panel met his forehead. There was a flash outside and a crackling, tearing noise followed by an oily flame-orange explosion and he felt himself spinning and then smashed to pieces against a chill wetness and then at last there was silence.

He awoke in an icy gray light, pain throbbing in his head and across his groin.

Nearby, a blackened motor sprouted twisted, curled propeller blades like some ugly, pale flower.

He looked around him with swollen, bruised eyes. He could see the shallow, descending path of the bomber’s descent through the trees.

The fuselage had broken in two. The rear half and the stub of a wing still burned with an oily, smoky flame.

He realized that he had been thrown clear somehow. He couldn’t think quite straight. Everything seemed distorted and confused. He had been flying with Tom—that much he could remember.

He tried to move to ease the pain in his groin and he found that the seat had been thrown from the cockpit and he was still strapped to it, half crouching, half sitting in the snow.

The wreckage ticked and creaked. Several fires were burning fitfully in the forest, and there were bits of twisted dural everywhere.

He unfastened the seat belt and rolled onto his knees. The pain in his head made him dizzy. His face was sticky and as he moved, a warmth flowed over his forehead and into his eves.

He had the brand of the crashed pilot, he thought vaguely. The torn scalp.

He looked around for Tom. His chest ached and his groin throbbed, too. The belt had tried to cut him in two at the impact.

He stumbled to his feet and stood for a moment, legs apart, head hanging, as the waves of pain cleared his head. He started toward the unburned section of the airplane calling Tom. There was no answer.

Now he remembered a little more. Tom had done something crazy. He had wanted to die. He had tried to kill them both by doing something crazy. Anger knotted in his throat. He grew furious with Tom and he muttered obscenities as he staggered through the soft snow.

He fell and the pain in his middle doubled him up and he lost track of time. The distance to the wreck seemed a million miles. He crawled toward it until he had the courage to brave the pain again and then he stood up and called Tom.

He found him in the shattered cockpit, wedged between the control yoke and the instrument panel. His face was white with shock, but he was conscious. Miguel heard him mutter something about leaving him alone goddam it, but he was too stunned himself to pay any attention. One thought only was dominating his mind right now and that was to block Tom’s wish for death. It didn’t make sense and he refused to have it. He worked to free Tom from the twisted control column, steadily cursing him.

He pulled Tom free and dragged him out into the snow. Tom screamed with pain and then Miguel saw his legs. They were a mangled bloodiness from the knees down. Bits of bone showed whitely through the flesh. Blood pumped from them in great arterial spurts.

Tom’s voice sounded shrill and unreal. There was hate mixed with the pain on his face. He twisted his body away as though he despised the thought of Miguel touching him.

Miguel stripped off his own belt and Tom’s too and put tourniquets on the pulpy legs. The flowing of blood into the snow slackened. Tom’s eyes rolled back in his head and he said faintly but with infinite venom, “You bastard. You bloody goddam bastard.”

“Shut up, Tom, shut up.” Miguel worked feverishly on him trying to stop the blood. He broke open the kit on his chute harness and found the morphine Syrette. He thrust the needle into Tom’s arm and squeezed the ampoule.

Everything seemed to be spinning around him. The trees, the smoldering wreckage. The snow had begun to fall. He tried to think. The highway. He had seen it just before the crash. It couldn’t be far away.

“Why don’t you just leave me here you lousy bastard,” Tom mumbled. “Leave me and then you’ll have her all the time—” He struck out at Miguel, trying to push him away. “You really deserve each other you lousy lousy bastard—” The morphine was hitting him, and the shock, and the pain.

He wanted to die but he wasn’t going to, no damn it, he wasn’t going to get his way and just die because Miguel wouldn’t let it happen that way. Miguel, kneeling in the snow beside him, said drunkenly, “You son of a bitch I’m not going to let you get away—did you hear me—” His voice had risen to a shrill, angry protest. “Damn you I won’t let you die!”

Tom turned his face into the wet snow. His breath sighed and his eyes rolled back in his head and stayed that way. His complexion was pasty yellow-gray.

Miguel slipped his arms under Tom and lifted, moaning with the pain it caused him. He could see one leg dangling by a shred of tendon and flesh. It fell off. The horror of it made no impression at all on Miguel. Tom’s head hung back, his mouth open.

They’ll be looking for us, Miguel thought, they won’t get our position report and they’ll be looking for us. But he knew that he would have to get Tom to the highway quickly. The tourniquets couldn’t completely stop the blood and Tom would die and he wasn’t going to let Tom die. He kept muttering to himself about Tom not dying. The idea was his single obsessive thought. He used it to hold back his own pain, and to find the strength to carry Tom through the deep snowdrifts when every step was a floundering agony.

Time became meaningless. Feet became yards and yards miles. Miguel drove himself to his limit and then far beyond. The world shrank to the tiny confines of his wavering circle of vision. Each step he counted as a defiance of Tom’s will to stop living and he raved and cursed and stumbled on. He imagined he saw Mr. Haushoffer in white apron and grocer’s cap standing in the drifts and shaking his bony finger at them and saying that they shouldn’t fight and there was Sandy running alongside, not dead at all, but a child of eleven again with a dime in his hand extended to Tom. Then Essie appeared and she was whipping Miguel across the groin with a steel rod so that every step was a stripe of pain and she kept saying filthy dirty you re filthy and dirty and—

The sound of a truck engine laboring up a grade brought a semblance of sanity. Miguel called out hoarsely but the sound died away in the distance. He fell to his knees and rose again and then topped a rise to see the black, shiny-wet ribbon of asphalt below him and he let Tom down into a drift gently and began to cry because there was nothing more he could do except beg him not to die.

He heard the siren on the highway.

Someone had seen them go down or had seen the fire.

He rubbed snow on Tom’s cheeks and Tom opened his eyes and looked at him and then turned away his eyes with his face as still and pale as the death of friendship. Miguel closed his eyes and let go of consciousness. He could hear the wind sighing and voices at a great distance and he tried to burrow deeper into himself to find some tiny spot of warmth to get away from the bonecracking cold. Why did you have to say what you did, Tom? he wondered, filled with a cobalt grief, why did you have to say those things?

SEVENTEEN

Through the curtain of uneasy sleep filtered the insistent voices of flight. The tremblings of the airframe spoke to him, the tiny creakings and whisperings accused.

Miguel stirred restlessly in his seat. It was an accident an accident accident—

Like hell.

“Mr. Rinehart?”

He opened his eyes and saw the shiny winged badge on the stewardess’s cap. The junior stewardess.

“You’re a nervous sleeper,” she said.

He looked around, trying to orient himself. The airplane was empty. The cabin lights were on, the cabin door stood open. He could hear voices outside. The stilled engines creaked and ticked as hot metal cooled. A cold wind blew in out of the gray morning. He thought of what he must do and he was filled with a kind of dread.

He shook himself and reached for a cigarette, then he remembered he could not smoke here.

“Are we—” He went hoarse with sleep still in his throat and she finished for him.

“San Francisco,” she said cheerily. “End of the line.”

BOOK TWO

San Francisco

EIGHTEEN

Miguel checked into the Mark and asked the clerk to arrange a car rental for him. Then he went to his room and showered and changed. From his window he could see the city spread out, as though for inspection, under the lead-colored cover of low clouds.

Seeing it so depressed him. It didn’t match the picture he had been carrying in his mind and he felt lonelier and more displaced than ever.

Somewhere, he thought, to the west, past the rise of hills beyond Van Ness, beyond the forest green of Golden Gate Park and facing the ocean, was Alaine’s new house in Seacliff. He had never seen the place but, knowing Allie, he could guess that it would be smart and tasteful—a kind of gembox of a place.

He took the French music box from his luggage and set it on the dresser. That would be the last and most painful chore-delivering the box to his daughter. Dorrie would have grown inches. Alaine had sent a picture to Rome but it hadn’t arrived in time so he had no idea of what Dorrie looked like now without her pigtails. And he had to remember that she would have forgotten him. He had to be prepared for that.

The thought of actually knocking on Alaine’s door and walking into her house after all this time was almost frightening. He wondered if he could possibly call and make arrangements to see Dorrie downtown—

He looked at himself in the mirror and said, “You goddam coward.”

He finished dressing and went down into the lobby. The place looked different. The furniture was rearranged someway and the whole effect was alien to him. He asked the clerk at the desk about it.

“Yes, sir,” the man said. “The place was completely redone by Dorothy Draper about four years ago.”

Miguel felt a stab of annoyance. Of course he remembered that. He hadn’t been away that long. But still the whole effect was not the familiar one he had expected.

“I must have remembered it differently,” Miguel said. He cashed another of his travelers’ checks at the cashier’s window and paid the deposit required for the car rental. The whole business was rather more complicated than he had expected. But finally he was told the car would be waiting for him in the garage when he was ready for it.

He bought a paper and noted briefly that a French nurse who had been at Dien Bien Phu was visiting the city, that Inge Borkh was singing Salomé at the Opera House, and that the Golden Gate Bridge directors were considering lowering the tolls.

The Chronicle in his hands made him feel a little more at home and he walked into the nearly empty Lochinvar Room and ordered breakfast.

In the early morning quiet he could hear the shave-and-a-haircut-six-bits bell of the cable car climbing the Powell Street hill. He half-smiled to himself. That was something you didn’t hear in Paris or Rome or anywhere else for that matter. It was a sound you carried inside your head, forgotten but always waiting to be remembered, if you were from the Bay Area.

He suddenly thought, not without some shock, that he hadn’t once given Nora space in his mind since the airplane touched down at International Airport. And then all the rest of it came crowding in on him and he lost what peace of mind his surroundings had begun to build in him.

He looked at his watch. Ten of nine. First he would see Essie.

He pondered calling the convent first, but decided against it. He didn’t want to take a chance on Esther not wanting to see him. The whole idea left a bitter taste in his mouth but he knew he had to try and see his sister. Not for her sake, he admitted. For his own.

He finished breakfast slowly and without appetite, thinking of Anson and Esther and the past. We’re the only Rineharts left, he thought. Esther and Luis and me. We still owe each other and ourselves the love and loyalty of a family.

But he faced the prospect of Essie with dread. For he knew that love and loyalty among the Rineharts was a he.

He drove down California Street to Van Ness through the thickening traffic. Overhead, the gray overcast was showing signs of breaking. Shafts of brightness leaked through the clouds, striking spears of light from store windows and the shiny cable-car tracks.

He drove carefully in the rented Ford sedan. The car felt huge and unwieldy and the other cars on the street seemed monstrous to him after the plain smallness of European machines.

He missed the big Lombard Street turnoff to the bridge and had to drive on out to Bay Street and then along Marina Boulevard past the St. Francis Yacht Club and the Palace of Fine Arts.

Seeing the cruisers and sailboats moored in the basin brought a nostalgic memory of the Nereid and old Morgan. He wondered if the Nereid were still afloat somewhere. He had heard that she had foundered in the Golden Gate sometime in 1940, but he had never had confirmation of the story. He would be sorry to think that the Nereid wasn’t still sailing. And with Morgan still at the helm, too; calm and impassive as a rock—

God, how the memories had possessed him these last few days. Was there ever an end? Yes, there must be. And seeing Essie was the first step, a beginning. What was it Olinder had said? Lay the ghosts? Miguel smiled and thought: a new experience. Laying ghosts.

He drove through the toll gate onto the great, single span of the Golden Gate Bridge. What a magnificent piece of work that was. You felt it each time you trusted your life to the tons of swinging steel and ferroconcrete arching high over the rushing waters of the narrows. A beautiful death wish in cable and flying tower. Through the years it drew suicides like a piper. And there was a kind of thanatoid suspension for everyone who drove out onto the span. It made you think of the Bridge of San Luis Rey. If it should fall—If. Who would spill down into the Gate with you? And why? A random sampling of humanity, or a selected few who needed to die and lacked the courage to squeeze a trigger or turn on the gas?

But the bridge didn’t fall. It wouldn’t ever unless men destroyed it. It would exist to the end of time, the perfect stasis of death in life.

He topped the gentle curving rise of the span and started down toward the Marin side. He thought of the days without number he had driven this route during the war. The times with Alaine, and with Tom, and with Nora, too—

He turned off at Corte Madera and drove into the hills. The sun was out now and the warmth made the inside of the Ford smell musty and impersonal, like a hotel room. The road wound deeper into the pressing green of the hills. He passed a new supermarket and the beginnings of a housing development and then at last he rounded a bend and saw the wrought-iron gates of the Convent of the Holy Name.

He was sorry now that he had come empty-handed. It would have been better to have some little thing for Essie—anything, really—some one thing to put in her hands and say, “It’s for you, hermanita.” But there was nothing and it was too late now.

He parked on the gravel drive in front of the big brick building. What did they call it in a convent, anyway? The place where you sat politely and chatted across the rim of two separate worlds?

He could see nuns walking or sitting in pairs in the gardens, their heads bending under the weight and warmth of the starched coifs. He walked to the door and pulled on the old-fashioned bell cord.

Presently the door opened and a nun, her face strangely pale to his eyes, looked at him enquiringly.

“My name is Miguel Rinehart, Sister,” he said. Tm looking for Sister Cecilia.”

“This is not a visiting day, Mr. Rinehart,” the nun said with that faintly reproachful unctuousness of ecclesiastics.

“I am Sister Cecilia’s brother,” he said. ‘Tm sure if you would speak to the Mother Superior—I have been out of the country for a long while and I haven’t much time.”

“Please come in,” the nun said, and opened the door wider. He followed her through a dark, hushed corridor into a large reception room comfortably furnished and lit by the morning sun coming through a row of tall French doors facing an inner

“If you will wait here I will see if Mother Superior can see you, Mr. Rinehart.”

“Thank you, Sister,” Miguel said.

He watched her go, listening to the dry rustle of her habit.

He looked about him—at the Rouault Crucifixion dominating the far wall and the copies of Fra Filippo Lippi in smaller array opposite the windows. Mother Superior’s taste in painting was excellent. The Annunciation was particularly good.

He was standing before it when the Mother Superior came in.

“You admire it, Mr. Rinehart?” she asked, smiling.

“I’ve always liked Lippi’s work, Reverend Mother.”

She noted the form of address and moved as if to bless him but he said quickly, “I was hoping to see my sister.”

“Please sit down,” she said.

Miguel waited until she had taken a chair and then sat down. “It is possible,” he said, “that my sister might prefer not to see me. If that’s the case, I’ll go.”

She inclined her head regretfully and said, “Sister Cecilia is no longer with us, Mr. Rinehart.”

Miguel felt a cold chill, as if the dark had moved a little closer. “No longer here? I don’t think I understand. Surely she hasn’t—”

“No, oh, no,” the Mother Superior said. “She has left this cloister for another.”

Miguel was completely perplexed.

“Sister Cecilia,” the Mother Superior said, “is a strange person, Mr. Rinehart. But devout. She thought our regimen here too undemanding.” The old nun shrugged. “It was between her and God to know. I did not presume to advise her. She is now a Discalced Carmelite.”

Miguel tried to remember what he knew of that order and it was very little.

“They are vowed to silence,” the Mother Superior said proudly, “and are the most cloistered of the orders in Christ.’’

“Where is her nunnery, Mother?”

“In Kentucky, Mr. Rinehart. But I would make no attempt to see her. She could not speak to you if you did.”

“I see,” Miguel said. And after a time, he said, “How long ago, Mother?”

“She left in December of last year.”

Even before he had gone to Europe. Essie had slipped even farther away and he had not known it.

He stood up and said, “Thank you for your time, Reverend Mother.”

The old nun saw him to the door and as he stepped outside, she put a hand upon his sleeve and said softly, “Be proud of her, Mr. Rinehart. We are.” And it seemed to Miguel that there was a look of sad compassion on the wrinkled, waxen face.

“I shall pray for you, my son,” the old nun said.

“Thank you,” Miguel said thoughtfully. Then he turned and walked slowly down the worn brick steps to his car.

NINETEEN

Miguel drove back to San Francisco, but he didn’t stop in the city. He stayed on 19th Avenue and headed straight south onto El Camino Real. His hands were shaking on the wheel and he wanted to stop and have a drink but it was too early and he knew that if he did he would try to hide inside the bottle until there was nothing left to do but crawl back and apologize to Nora.

I’ll be triply goddamned first, he thought. If I go back and when I go back it won’t be because I didn’t have the guts to find out if there is any other way. Miguel Rinehart, horse’s ass nonpareil, is trying to grow up. Jesus God, wasn’t that a laugh, though?

The King’s Highway, through San Bruno, Burlingame, San Mateo, Belmont, San Carlos, Redwood City—he wondered if Stanford men (men! babies, infants mewling and puking!) were still beating the bushes of Redwood City for townies. Of course, naturally. Some things couldn’t change. He remembered how Lawt Higby always used to carry a mattress in the tonneau of his Olds convertible whenever he went on a date with a town girl. Lawt was always a rounding son of a bitch. Miguel had never liked him. Such trifles were the building blocks of greatness among your fellow men. He wondered what had happened to Lawt. And Julian Trowbridge. By now they must have become pillars of society with memberships in the Guardsmen and the Bohemian Club and pretty wives in the Junior League. Success came to everyone, eventually, if they were smart and conformed by living according to the great American dream. Julie and Lawt and that slob Ayula and of course, the Love Goddess.

Why had Nora given Victor Ziegler the business about Alaine, anyway? Did she really imagine that Alaine would make money troubles—good sweet Jesus, she should know better than that. Once you admitted there was nothing phony about Nora, you also had to admit she never did anything without a reason. Could she really hate Alaine so much she wanted even people who didn’t know her to think of her as a money-grubbing bitch? It was possible. When you thought about it, it was more than just possible.

How stupid could a man be? he wondered. It had never occurred to him that Nora actually hated Alaine for being his wife.

There was something lacking in Nora. Just what it was escaped him. Compassion, perhaps. Or maybe empathy would be a better word. What she hated was all black. And what she loved was all white.

He looked at himself in the rear view mirror and thought: Take a bow, White Knight. The White Queen’s Knight, to be exact. And it followed that the White Queen—White, because Nora certainly loved Nora and there was no question about that—it followed that the White Queen loved her Knight. And found him just a little foolhardy. And stupid. Not very bright. You have to be patient with him, you see, because he’s brave but not very bright.

He pounded on the steering wheel with the heel of his hands. How long, he wondered, had he known Nora felt like that?

Goddam her beautiful little beady-eyed body. What did that leave now? If there was no place to go? He thought of the bridge arching high over the Golden Gate. Did he have that kind of courage? With an effort he forced the thought from his mind, or tried to. The idea lingered defiantly. Maria’s way. The final, genuine screw-you gesture when there was no place left to go.

When he reached Palo Alto, he stopped at an unfamiliar shopping center where the Indian Drive-In used to be and called Becky’s number. It was listed that way now: Mrs. Becky Coulter Rinehart, Country Club Drive, Los Altos. Only it should really be Becky Coulter Rinehart fils et père—

He almost hung up before there was an answer but suddenly Becky’s voice came through the receiver and he stood for a moment in the booth, tongue-tied and not moving.

Finally, he said, “Becky?”

“Yes?” The voice sounded puzzled. Didn’t many men call dear Becky at this hour of the morning? “Yes, who is this?”

“It’s Mike, Becky, I—”

“Mike, I knew it—Something told me you were going to call. Something told me. Where are you now?”

She actually sounded glad to hear him, Miguel thought with surprise.

“I’m in Palo Alto, Becky.”

“Are you alone? Did you come down on the train? You’re coming out, aren’t you?”

“Yes I’m alone and no I have a car and I’ll come out if you have no objections,” Miguel said.

“Objections! Why, Mike—I want to see you.”

Miguel stared for a moment at the round, blind eye of the telephone dial. He hadn’t been quite prepared for this much cordiality from Becky. Their last parting had been acrimonious, to say the least.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll be out in about fifteen minutes.”

He hung up the receiver thinking about that last parting. During the war he had done his best to see as little of Becky as possible. Even after he was transferred to Hamilton Field, only sixty miles from home, he stayed away from home.

Alaine had tried to change that while Raoul was alive, but he had resisted her so stubbornly that she began to understand that there were things about his leaving home that he had never discussed with her. That must have hurt her, he knew, because Allie hated to be shut out.

And then, in 1947, had come that last time at home and Alaine had been there and had seen in the viciousness of his attack on Becky that there was a sexual antagonism between son and stepmother as well as the conflicts brought on by Raoul’s death.

They had arrived too late. Raoul was dead. And Miguel, resentfully, had told Becky, “I can’t help it. I’ve never thought of you as my father’s wife. I never will, either.”

Becky, crying, had replied, “Believe this much of me, Mike. I loved him very much.”

“All those who believe in fairies and don’t want Tinker Bell to die will now clap their hands.”

When Becky turned her face to the wall, he had gone on, helpless to stop himself, his voice harsh and bitter.

“You’ve done yourself proud, Becky.” And he had turned to Alaine, who sat staring out at the Santa Clara Valley and trying not to listen. “Tell me, Allie. Have you ever heard of a young woman falling in love with an old poor man?”

“God, Mike, what a thing to say.”

“You’re right. We shouldn’t have come home.”

Becky had cried out, “Your father is dead, Mike.”

“Yes. That’s true. But he had a ball while it lasted, didn’t he? Ask Luis. God damn it—ask my mother.”

Becky had buried her face in her hands, shaking her head. “Be proud, Becky,” Miguel had said, picking up his coat. “Be proud and happy and live to be a thousand years old. Only leave me alone.”

“Have you even forgotten what you promised him?”

“Did I promise something?”

“Please, oh, please. It doesn’t matter what you think of me.

But try to understand him. You made him a promise. Keep it, Mike. Or you’ll regret it the rest of your life.”

“We Rineharts are pretty good at making promises, Becky. Were just not so very good at keeping them. Allie—let’s go.”

“Don’t do this, Mike,” Alaine had said.

He had felt a flaring resentment of her. Why couldn’t she understand? Why couldn’t she stay on his side? He had felt a blind yearning for Nora. Nora would understand.

“You promised,” Becky had said again in a shattered voice. ‘“You promised to take his ashes to The Spur.”

“You do it, Becky. Or better still, find Luis. Let him do it.” And they had parted that way and on the way back to San Francisco, Alaine had told him that he was the cruelest man she had ever known and he had told her to mind her own damned business—that she didn’t know what it was that lay between Becky Coulter and the Rinehart men.

The road up to the house looked just the same. The garden was thicker, the trees taller. He thought of old Ben Shriker, who had designed the house. The way it looked now would please him. It had a look of belonging where it was, nested in greenery. A look of real peace. God, what a laugh that was. The House of Loners. Not one happy man or woman had ever lived in that house unless it was old Avery and even he was dead and buried and forgotten.

He parked the car and walked across the gravel drive to the door. The door opened and Becky was there, her hands extended, ready to draw him inside.

He was shocked at the change in her. Her hair was streaked with gray. Her body—that magnificent, glandular panther’s body, was heavier and matronly now. He had to stop and think for a moment and tell himself that Becky was forty-two now and a middle-aged woman.

She wore flat-heeled shoes and frontier pants that would have been perfect on her long ago but were too tight now and the black cardigan hugged breasts that seemed to have been absorbed into her body.

“Hello, Becky,” he said.

She took his hands, both of them, and said, “I’m glad to see you, Mike. I really am.”

Why did I come? he wondered. But he knew that he had had to come see her, that she was in some unreasoned way, a part of the search.

They went into the living room and he noticed that she had changed the furniture. Everything was tasteful but nondescript. This was Becky’s house now. Everything that might have reminded him of Raoul or of the past was gone.

“Can I get you some coffee?” she asked. “Sit down and I’ll bring you something. Have you eaten?”

He drew a deep breath and said, “I could use a drink, Beck).”

Her hands were nervous. “I think I have something. Let me look.”

She was living without servants. Her fingernails were stained with soil. She saw that he noticed and said, as she searched through a nearly empty liquor cabinet, “I’ve been doing a lot of gardening. Believe it or not. I like it.”

He waited.

She said, “I have some Scotch. Will that do?”

“That’ll be fine, Becky. Just plain water. No ice.”

“I guess you’re used to not having ice. I understand it’s hard to get abroad.”

“Yes.” He accepted the drink and took a long pull at it. She sat down opposite him with her hands folded in her lap.

Presently, she said, “I read in the paper that you had arrived in New York.”

That son of a bitch Ayula, Miguel thought. “It wasn’t a very newsworthy item,” he said.

“Nora Ames is very lovely, Mike,” Becky said, as though impressed that he should know a celebrity like the Love Goddess. “I’ve seen her on the screen. Is she really as pretty—” Her voice trailed off to nothingness and in the stillness he could hear the ticking of a clock in the bedroom.

Becky made another start and said, “Are you going south soon?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t made up my mind.”

“The paper said you were going to work on The Green Hills of Home. I read the book. It was a wonderful story.”

He smiled at her faintly, thinking that she was rather ill-at-ease with him and in her way was trying to break through the barriers and that he wasn’t helping her much.

“How is everything, Becky?”

“Everything is fine, Mike. Really.”

“I’m glad for you.”

“And with you, Mike?”

“All right, I guess.”

There was an awkward pause, and then Becky said, “You remember Allie Wylie, of course—” She looked away in momentary confusion. “That was a foolish way to say it, wasn’t it—”

“What about her?” Miguel was surprised at the calmness of his voice.

“Nothing, really. I see her downtown occasionally. She and her husband bought a house in Tor Terrace. You remember Frenchman’s Tor.”

“I remember.”

“It’s a very nice residential district now.”

Miguel regarded Becky blankly. How different she seemed, how pitifully banal and ill-at-ease. He looked down into the amber liquid in his glass, feeling numb.

“Have you seen Alaine and Dorrie yet?” Becky asked.

“Not yet,” he said. “Have you?”

“Not for over a year.” She laughed a little and added, “I don’t get to the city often. I can’t seem to find the time now. The traffic is so bad and the trains are crowded and I just never seem able to get away. You know.”

“Sure. I know.”

In the silence he watched her and she looked away. “I’m happy, Mike. It’s very peaceful here now.”

He caught her meaning and said. “Yes, it must be. Now.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Sure you did, Becky. But forget it. Have you heard from Luis?”

Her expression changed. “You mean—you didn’t know, Mike?”

“Know what? He never writes, you know that. And we move around so much—” He looked at her, his dark brows knit. “What is it, Becky?”

“Luis is dead, Mike. I thought surely you knew.”

Miguel sat in silence. There was a tightness in his chest and throat.

“When? How did it happen?” he asked.

“I don’t understand too much about it,” Becky said. “It was a border raid or something like that. An incident, a reprisal. I don’t know. You knew he was a colonel in the Israel Defense Force?”

“I knew he was in Tel Aviv in 1947. That’s all I know.” He put his glass down on the arm of the couch and simply sat for a moment. “How long ago, Becky?”

“It happened last March, I think,” Becky said.

“An incident,” Miguel said slowly. “Not even during their war.”

“He remarried, Mike. A girl in Palestine. She wrote to me after it happened. And there was a letter for Raoul—” Becky’s dark eyes filled with tears suddenly. “He had written it a long time before and asked her to send it to his father if anything ever happened to him. He didn’t know Raoul was dead.” Becky stood up and walked to the window. “The girl thought I was his mother—he never told her about Raoul and me. He even changed the way he spelled his name.” Her voice broke a little and she stood for a moment facing the valley before turning to face Miguel. She swallowed and said, “Would you like to see the letters, Mike?” She walked over to her desk and brought him the letters. Miguel read:

Dear Mrs. Rinehart, It is with sorrow that I write to tell you that Lewis Rheinhardt, who was your eldest son and my husband, was killed in a border raid on the second day of March this year. He was a brave soldier and a kind and gentle husband and my heart will be forever filled with love for him. We were married nearly two years. Even though I could bear him no children because of the things that were done to me in the camps of the Germans he loved me with kindness and understanding. Forgive my so clumsy English. I cannot express myself properly. It may comfort you to know that Colonel Lewis Rheinhardt will always be remembered and respected by the people for whom he gave up his life. It was his wish that I should remain here and so I will never meet you face to face. But I shall always cherish the knowledge that I have a mother in the great country of my husbands birth. With respect and affection I send to you a letter that Lewis wished sent to his father if the hazards of his profession should end his life. I need nothing so please do not feel obligated to me in any way. It is the way Lewis wished it. Shalom aleichem. Maryam Rheinhardt (Mrs. Lewis Rheinhardt) Tel Aviv, 5th March.

Miguel looked up at Becky and said slowly, “She loved him. You can see that she did.”

“Yes,” Becky said. “I was glad for him, Mike. Terribly glad. Do you believe that?”

“I believe it.” Miguel thought about the woman who had written the angular script on the oddly shaped European stationery in his hands. His brothers wife. Maryam. Strange and exotic name. Luis, who was more Spanish and German than Jewish, had found where he belonged at last and then died fighting for it. Like Anson. For a moment, Miguel felt a deep pang of envy. Anson in the earth of Cataluna—Luis in the sandy soil of Israel. Was that the only real and final answer? Was death the only end of loneliness and grief?

He unfolded the single, typed sheet of Luis’s letter to Raoul. The letter his father had never read.

Raoul—I call you this at first because I write this to you as simply a man, and not your son. I am your son, of course. Blood of your blood and flesh of your flesh. But we never had it so while I lived and it cannot be that way now. But don’t imagine that I’m striking at you from the grave filled with any sort of rancor or bitterness. We, each of us, were simply what we were and we could act only as we were meant to act. In a sense, these past few years, I’ve become something of a mystic. Perhaps a fatalist. There are so many things I want to say to you, but in the end it comes down to this. If you had loved me as you loved Miguel—I might have been the son you always wanted me to be. But you did not and I could not be. Miguel was your son. Not I. I bear neither you nor Miguel any malice. I’m sorry, of course, as you must sometimes be, that you did not have love enough for us both. I know now that this is so and I no longer resent it as I did. About Becky. What you took from me was nothing. I don’t put it this way to be insulting or bitter. I never loved Becky. You knew it, and God help me, I could never hide it from her. I was hurt by your way of taking her, but when the hurt was gone and I was free of her, there was nothing but relief. I have been happy here with Maryam. In a way I’m sorry that you won’t ever be as happy as I have been. You will probably never know what it is to love a woman without a monkey of guilt on your shoulder. I say it that way because it seems absurd now that you can’t. The metaphor is apt. I’m sorry for you. I truly am. If it helps you at all to know that I have been really happy here with Maryam, I give you my blessing. You did not love me as a father and I did not love you as a son. I’m sorry about that, too, though it is a senseless sorrow for something that never was. I should like to write to Miguel, too, but I find I have nothing to say to him. He must feel that I informed on him, betrayed him once when I saw him making the same kind of mistake I made. One more regret. I did what I thought best. He didn’t love the girl. Not enough and not in the right way. One last thing, Raoul. You have always blamed yourself for Mother’s death. Don’t. She had a kind of pride you couldn’t understand. She was a woman who could not live forgotten. I understand it and perhaps Miguel can. People like you and like Becky are too practical to know what that land of lonely pride is. I have just reread this and the tone seems harsh. I don’t mean it to be. I am simply saying things to you that I must say if I am, for this one last time, to sign myself: Your son, Luis.

Luis, he thought. Luis, my brother. How very different everything could have been if only we had been—what? Different, what else? Different if we had been different, what an ungodly redundant nonsensical thing to think. How could anything have been better with each of them as they were?

“This was the only letter from Luis?” Miguel said.

Becky nodded. “Before the war there were cards—you remember. But afterwards, nothing. Until this.”

Miguel folded the letters carefully together and handed them to Becky.

“So he found something good,” he said.

“What he needed, I think. I hope so, Mike.”

Miguel finished his drink and walked to the liquor cabinet for another. Becky followed him with her eyes.

“Everyone needs to be loved, Mike,” she said pleadingly. “I needed it, too.”

Miguel felt his lip curl slightly. “Does that explain what happened that night we were together here?”

Becky flushed and looked away. “That was something else. Not love, Mike. Not for either one of us. I loved Raoul and he loved me.”

“You have to believe that, don’t you?”

“Because it’s the truth. That—time with us. Can I try to explain it to you, Mike? It’s troubled me for years—what you thought of me.”

“You know what I’ve thought,” he said. “Of you and of me.”

“Oh, Mike, Mike, you mustn’t blame yourself for what happened. And—Mike—it would be kind if you wouldn’t blame me, either.”

“Somebody was guilty,” he said dryly.

She shook her head and said, “The things you do to yourself—and to the people around you, Mike. It’s cruel. What kind of iron standards do you have, anyway?”

“Standards? Me?” He laughed mirthlessly. “That’s the best yet. You can’t think of more than three commandments I haven’t written off.”

“I mean it, Mike. That night was just—” She shook herself, as though she were describing a narrow escape that some friend of hers, some acquaintance, might have had. “We were together too much. You were young and attractive. I was still young enough. It happened the way it did and I’m grateful to you for stopping when you did. But that’s all. It wasn’t love. I loved your father. Perhaps it was just that you were so like him—and young. That’s the only explanation I have.”

“That was it? Just like that?”

“Just like that, Mike,” she said sadly.

“Glands.”

“If you want to put it that way.”

“I do. It fits my iron standards better.”

“Don’t fight with me, Mike. Please don’t. I want us to be friends.”

What she said was true and it had the effect of making him feel that the walls were moving in on him. He felt suffocated in this house now, so full of Raoul’s unreturned affection for him. Becky seemed to read his mind.

“Your father loved you very much, Mike. He loved you with all his heart.”

“Don’t, Becky.”

Her voice was relentless. It pierced his ears. “He loved you enough so that no matter how you hurt him he couldn’t stop.”

“Becky. Don’t, I said. I don’t want to talk about that.”

“Oh, Mike, what’s the matter with you? What is it that won’t let you be loved?”

“What did you say?”

“Why can’t you let anyone love you?”

“Alaine said that,” he said unsteadily.

“The night Raoul died he called for you over and over again.” Becky stood up and took his arm. “He kept pleading with me not to let you forget your promise to him.”

“No, Becky—I don’t want to talk about this. Neither do you.”

“But I do. I have to. Can’t you see that? Please, Mike. Do that one thing for him and I’ll never ask you to do another. He loved you so much and he didn’t know how to tell you.”

He felt a constriction in his throat. He had a wild impulse to run. God, he thought, I’m losing my mind.

“I have to go, Becky,” he said. “I have to go back.”

“Please, Mike. Stay and talk to me.” Her eyes were filled with tears. “It’s almost like having him back again to see you here.”

“Don’t say that!”

His voice was ragged and uncontrolled.

“I’ll call you, Becky,” he said, wanting only to get away from the house, to get away from her.

“Will you take your father’s ashes to The Spur, Mike?”

He twisted away from her and opened the door. “Don’t bother to come out,” he said. “I’d rather you didn’t.”

“Mike—” Becky raised a hand as if to stay him. Then she dropped it to her side and smiled at him with sympathy. “There’s nothing wrong with being happy, Mike. I found it out. I hope you do, too.”

He closed the door behind him and walked swiftly to his car. It was all he could do to keep from looking behind him and up into the sky to see if he were being followed.

TWENTY

He drove to Frenchman’s Tor.

Right up to the last minute, when the road curved and he saw the neat, ivy-decked sign that said Tor Terrace, he had been sure he wouldn’t have the courage to seek Allie Wylie out. But when the time came he guided the car toward the hill as though there were not a thousand doubts in his mind.

The road was paved, a main trunk road for a housing development spreading all over the ridge and the adjacent slopes. The stand of oaks was gone. A redwood-and-glass contemporary house stood where they had been. Miguel parked the car at the curb and sat for a time, smoking a cigarette and looking at the valley. He could hear children playing behind the high grape-stake fences along the street.

A quartet of Banshee jets screamed overhead, letting down into the landing pattern at Moffett Field. He remembered the lazy flight of the Macon, bright silver in the sunshine. It seemed part of another life, another time-slower and somehow less jarring to the heart and mind.

I’m remembering it wrong, he thought. I’m remembering it with the selective nostalgia of middle age.

He glanced out of the window to see a towheaded boy standing in the drive of the redwood house. He was about five or six and he was watching Miguel with that open curiosity of youth. Wondering, Miguel thought, if I’m a kidnapper or a policeman or Jack the Ripper. Jack Rinehart, specialist in crimes against children, stepmothers, and motion picture stars. Mr. Adulterer Rinehart, if you please. Profession: none. Chances: lost. Future: questionable.

The boy walked slowly down the walk to the street and said, “Hi.”

Miguel snubbed out his cigarette and said, “Hi, yourself.”

The boy said, “Did you see the jets? They were Banshees.”

“I saw them,” Miguel said. “They really go, don’t they?”

“They fly over the house all the time. They’re Navy jets. Do you live around here?”

“I used to,” Miguel said. “I’m just visiting.”

“I’ve lived here for a long time.”

“What’s you name, son?”

“John.”

“I’ll bet everyone calls you Johnny.”

“Some people do. What’s your name?”

“Mike.”

“What’s your last name?”

“Rinehart.”

The boy picked up a pebble and tossed it from hand to hand. “I have a sister and a baby brother,” he said.

“That makes it pretty nice for you, I guess.”

The gate in the grapestake opened and a woman in a house dress called, “Johnny?”

The boy half-turned and then said to Miguel, “That’s my mom.”

The woman walked swiftly down toward the car. She had sunburned blond hair and a wide-boned face. She wore no make-up. She said, “I’m sorry if he’s bothering you—” She took the boy’s hand.

Miguel said, “He’s no bother. We were talking—”

The woman brushed a strand of hair out of her face. Her eyes met Miguel’s and held there.

After what seemed a long while, Miguel heard himself say slowly, “Hello, Allie. I was looking for you.”

“Mike. Mike Rinehart.”

Miguel felt numb. He almost hadn’t recognized her. It wasn’t her looks that had changed so much. It was something else. Something inside.

“It’s been a long time, hasn’t it, Allie?” he said. He was amazed at the quiet impersonality of his tone.

The little boy clung to Allie’s hand.

Miguel said, “Your son?”

“Yes.” She seemed uncomfortable standing there talking to him. Presently she said, “Would—would you like to come in for a minute?”

“Why, no. No, thanks just the same, Allie. I haven’t much time. I just wanted to see the Tor again.” He paused, trying to think of something to say. “Funny you should have a house right here—”

She broke in on him with a nervous laugh. “John saw the place and just fell in love with it. John’s my husband, Mike. John Harmon?”

“I don’t think I knew him,” Miguel said apologetically.

“I guess you wouldn’t have. We met in the East. In Norfolk—” She broke off, as though embarrassed by the mention of Norfolk.

There were a thousand things Miguel had thought he would want to say to Allie, but he could think of nothing now that wouldn’t sound inane.

“You’ve done very well, Mike,” Allie said, smoothing her dress. It was an edgy gesture as though she were conscious of how she must look, without stockings, her bare feet in sandals, her house dress plain and faded. “We’ve followed your career all along. Los Altos boy makes good.” She laughed again. He wanted to cry out to her: For God’s sake, Allie, don’t be so frightened. I’m not going to say or do anything.

“Have you been down to see Becky?” she asked.

“I just came from there.”

“Midge is married, you know.”

“No. I didn’t know.”

“She married Lawton Higby, of all people. They live in Stockton now. Lawt couldn’t get into the Army.”

Miguel nodded stupidly, not knowing what to say. Allie rushed on. “When I read about you in the paper yesterday I said to John that you might even stop by to see us, isn’t that crazy? I never thought you would, of course. But he said he’d love to meet you because everybody around here remembers you so well—” She laughed again.

“Allie?”

Her face went pale and she said, “Yes?”

He was going to ask her if her husband knew about the things that had happened, but suddenly it didn’t seem worth mentioning. It had all happened a long time ago and it was forgotten and covered over with the dross of years and why even talk about it now? He felt as though something he had carried inside himself for a long while had vanished into nothingness, leaving a blank and empty space where it had been.

“How about your mother and father?”

“Daddy died last year. Mother went East to live with her sister.”

“I see,” he said.

“I was sorry to hear about Luis, Mike.”

“Yes,” Miguel said. “It was a shock to me.”

Aldyth shifted her weight nervously. “Of course, I hardly knew him.”

He wanted suddenly to break off this conversation and he was sure Allie felt the same way, but neither of them knew how. He glanced at the little boy pulling at Aldyth’s hand. “That’s quite a boy you’ve got there.”

There was a pride in her voice that should have stabbed Miguel to the heart, but somehow didn’t, as she said, “He’s just like his father.” And then, because she must have sensed his blankness, she asked, “How many children have you, Mike?”

“Only one. A daughter.” He smiled a bit ruefully and added, “She’s just like her father, too.”

Conversation languished. Young Johnny grew restless. Allie said, “Are you sure you won’t come in? Some coffee?”

“No, thanks, really. I have to be going.”

He started the motor. Allie stepped back. She picked up her son, holding him in her arms. She looked relieved.

Miguel said quickly, “I’m glad everything turned out well for you, Allie.”

She nodded and held the boy closer, rubbing her cheek against his as he squirmed in her arms.

As the car moved away, Miguel heard him shout, “So long, Mike! Be seein’ ya.”

Miguel lifted a hand and drove slowly down the street. As he turned the corner he could see Aldyth carrying the boy back into the house.

TWENTY-ONE

By five o’clock Miguel had stopped at five bars along El Camino and had a martini in each. There was a buzzing sound in his ears and the whole front of his jaw felt numb. The traffic was fierce and the more he drank, the more exaggerated became his caution. He drove along in the line of cars moving north through Daly City, the car radio turned up as loud as it would go, and his hands beating time on the steering wheel. The radio speaker overloaded so that all that came out of it was a modulated roar with the pounding beat of traps and an occasional crash of a sock-cymbal.

The perfect music for the goddam atomic age, he thought blurrily. First the flash and then the shockwave and then the firestorm and then flip the record over and have another go at it, only louder and funnier please, because the five martinis weren’t enough and now he needed to stop and find a place where he could have another.

He drove down 19th Avenue and turned into Stonestown, looking for a bar. He spotted the familiar symbol of the neon cocktail glass and the olive and toothpick. Only was it an olive, after all? It could be that being a martini drinker predisposed you to think of it as an olive. If you were a manhattan drinker it would probably be a cherry. He decided to ask the bartender and parked the car.

The inside of the bar was dim, amber-colored, and filled with soft and nondescript music. The tables were all occupied and there were only a few stools at the bar. He sat down and ordered a martini.

The bartender put the drink in front of him and he drank it “Another one, please.”

The bartender gave him a funny look and poured gin into the shaker. Miguel studied his own face in the mirror behind the bar. There had been something he wanted to ask the barman but he’d forgotten what it was now. What I should do, he thought, is go home and curl up in bed with a good book. He reached into his pocket for cigarettes and found he was out. He went to the vending machine and selected a brand at random. He returned to his seat and drank half of the martini and then opened the cigarette pack and reached into his coat pocket for a match. He came up with the paperback Bellamie book.

The man next to him glanced at it as he put it on the bar. Miguel looked at him and said, “Haven’t you ever seen an albatross before? I wear it around my neck.”

The man turned away quickly and Miguel laughed at him. The man got up and moved to another stool.

Miguel lit his cigarette and drank some more of his martini. He looked at the Clift-like man and Nora on the cover of the book. A busty lusty gusty tale of swashbuckling adventure, a million copies sold to children, innocents, cretins and campfire girls with a love of auld Erin in their green little veins. Or was it awld Erin? No dialectician, I, he thought. No writer, either. No love, no nothing. He glared at the image in the glass behind the bar. What now? Little man, what now?

He finished the martini and opened the book. First printing, 2nd printing, 3rd, 4th, five, six o’leary, and now CinemaScope with additional dialogue by Miguel Rinehart who was once said to be a promising young novelist and now—what? He flipped the page and read: “The Green Hills of Home, a Novel of High Adventure by Kathryn Bellamie.” Dear old Kate, he thought, smelling of Coty’s Emeraude and secreting saccharine instead of sweat. And what a blessing she must be to readers drenched in the sort of wolfsbane they get from the likes of writers like that eminent Latin-American Miguel Jos6 Maria de Castana Rinehart.

There was something written on the page in a childish and unformed hand with circles instead of dots over the i’s. He held it up to the light and squinted at it. The page seemed to dance around. Some message from Donna Katarina La Petrarcha? Some words of wisdom for the hopeful disciple?

He read, “You owe me a dinner. I’m in the phone book. Jean Murray.”

The bartender was watching him. Miguel said, “Now who in hell is Jean Murray?”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t know, Mac.”

Dinner, Miguel thought foggily. Dinner. Yes, by God, the stewardess on the plane. He’d asked her to have dinner with him. And here was her name. And where, oh please, where was the phone book? To the bartender, he said, “What do you think of that? A gift from old Kathryn.” He shoved his glass at the man. “Another, please. And some change.”

He tried to remember what the girl looked like. He couldn’t. It didn’t matter. She was a gift. A gift in time of need. Dear God, how he needed her right now.

“Where’s the phone?”

“Over in the corner by the head.”

He walked to the booth. He had some difficulty finding the number. The page wouldn’t hold still. Finally he pinned it down with a forefinger and read, “Jean Murray, 16 Bay Street, Apt 2, Yukon 1-5598.”

“Let her be home,” he said aloud as he dialed. “Please let her be home.”

The phone rang several times before it was answered.

“St. Michael for the True Cross,” Miguel said.

“Who is this?”

“Is this Jean Murray? Jean Murray the A Girl?”

There was a pause and then she said, “Oh, I know who it is. You found the number.”

“The trap snapped shut three minutes ago,” he said. “Tell me, if you can dream true—who is this?”

“It’s Miguel Rinehart, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you?”

“In a bar.”

“That, I can tell. But where?”

“In Stonestown.”

“Stonestown—what are you doing way out there? Why aren’t you here?”

“I’m waiting to be invited.”

“You are invited, Mr. Rinehart.”

“I accept. How do I get there?”

“Have you a car?”

“I have.”

“Are you all right to drive?”

“Californians are always safe to drive. It’s our hot-rod heritage.”

She laughed and gave him instructions, repeating herself several times.

“Shall I bring anything?” he asked.

“Such as what?”

“Gin? Bourbon?”

“I’ve got plenty.”

“I won’t make the obvious answer to that.”

“What?”

“I said, I’m practically on my way.”

“Hurry,” she said, and hung up.

He returned the receiver to the hook and returned to his seat at the bar. The crowd had thinned out and the bartender was looking at the book. He pushed it toward Miguel as Miguel picked up his cigarettes and his change.

He tried to remember Jean Murray’s face. There was nothing at all in his mind but the muscular movement of hard, tight buttocks under a uniform skirt. That, and a little pair of golden wings on the left couloir of Annapurna.

The martini was warm and tasted watery, but he drank it anyway. He tore the title page out of The Green Hills of Home and slid the book across the bar to the bartender. “Nothing like a good book on a slow night. Read it, you’ll have a ball.”

The barman wiped the bar and said, “Good night.” His eyes flicked over the page in Miguel’s hand. “And good luck.”

She met him at the door wearing black velvet matador pants and a red-gold blouse. Her hair was short, loose and tousled, and there were black velvet slippers on her feet. On one hip was sewn a red-gold rose. It moved forward and back as she walked and Miguel thought it the most suggestive thing he had ever seen.

“What a beautiful sight,” he said.

She laughed and drew him inside. He put the packaged bottle of Gilbey’s on a table just inside the door. “I didn’t want to come empty-handed. It’s against the custom of the country,” he said.

“Do you want a martini?” she asked.

“That would be fine.”

He watched the rose undulate across the room to the tiny pullman kitchen visible behind a Shoji screen.

“Sit down,” she called. “Be comfortable. I’ll just be a minute. There’s music if you want it.”

Miguel walked to the black bent-tube record rack. It was the kind they advertised in The Saturday Review. He flipped the folders, inspecting the titles. He wanted a drink badly. The liquor he had taken earlier lay like a pool of slag in his middle.

He looked around at the two Braque prints on the green pastel walls. Evidently Jean had decorated the place herself. He could see the uneven edge between the green wall and the pale tan ceiling. The furniture was all black reinforcing rod and bright-colored canvas. All except the couch. That was a huge black lushness shot through with gold threads.

Jean called from the kitchenette, “Do you like olives or onions in your martinis?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Just make sure they’re cold and dry.”

“I’ll settle for that,” she said. Miguel heard the ice tinkling in a martini pitcher.

He turned his attention to the records again. The Warsaw Concerto, The Red Poppy, André Kostelanetz Favorites. He selected an LP of Cole Porter music and put the record on the matched Bogen set. Everybody had one these days. You couldn’t get by socially without High Fidelity. High fidelity music for a low fidelity society, he thought. Damn, would she hurry with that drink?

She came in with a tray, a glass pitcher of martinis and two iced glasses. He moved a copy of Charm over on the coffee table and she put the tray down. Then she sat down on the couch and poured the drinks. She handed him one and lifted her glass. ‘Tm so glad you could come, Mr. R.,” she said.

He drank his drink down in two swallows, like a thirsty man. It was a good martini. She watched him and there was a suggestion of a smile on her lips. He noticed that she had very brown eyes and her eyebrows were delicately arched. The red-gold blouse didn’t look as though there were anything under it. He thought, what do we talk about until it’s time for me to make a pass?

“Do you want to go out to dinner, or what?” he asked.

“What do you want to do?”

Well, what would she say if he simply told her I want to go to bed with you and bury my head in the valley between Annapurna and K2 and forget I’m alive, forget about Becky and Raoul and that frightened little housewife with the towheaded boy who might have been mine—that’s all I want. “Let’s think about it later,” he said.

“All right. How’s the martini?”

“Very fine.” He held out his glass and she refilled it. Her eyes seemed to glisten as she looked at him. She had a fine quality of making a man think that being with him was all in the world she wanted to do.

“What did you imagine when you saw my note in your book?” He shrugged. “I was surprised. Why didn’t you just say something on the airplane?”

She laughed. “I knew you’d call.” There was a chilling echo of Nora in the way she said that. And yet, she was right, wasn’t she? Right as rain. Right as hell. Right down the old alley. You set ’em up and you can’t miss. Why was it that availability always made a woman so irresistible? And wasn’t that a passion-killing little thought. It made you feel like a lemming.

He finished the martinis and offered to make more.

“You’ll find everything you need in there,” she said.

When he returned she had taken off her shoes and was sitting cross-legged on the enormous black and gold couch looking pleased with herself. I’ve seen looks like that on cats with feathers on their whiskers, he thought. The drinks were beginning to work on him again.

“I’m apt to get drunk,” he said. “I haven’t eaten since this morning.”

“Do you want something? I can fix it.”

He laughed. “No, no, thanks.”

“Do you want to get loopy drunk?”

“I think I’d like that very much.”

“Good. Then let’s both get sloppy, shall we?”

“Aren’t you afraid to get drunk with strangers?” he asked.

She laughed meaningfully. “You’re no stranger, Miguel. You’re hand-picked.”

“And you can take care of yourself.”

“When I want to.”

He put his drink down and watched her. She moved in close to him and sank into his arms. Then she reached up and kissed him and bit his lip. He reached inside her blouse immediately. She moved away with practiced competence. “Uh uh. Not yet.” She picked up her drink again and finished it, looking at him over the rim of the glass.

He poured more into his glass. The numbness was stealing over him again but with it was coming the depression. He wanted to think of nothing but this girl and the anesthesia she offered, but other thoughts kept intruding.

“Tell me about Nora Ames,” she said.

“Nothing to tell.”

She smiled and said, “All right. Later then.” She got up and walked to the bookshelf. She took a copy of The Canceled Skies down and with it was a copy of The Exile.

“I went out this afternoon and bought this,” she said.

“That’s how sure you were I’d call.”

“That’s how sure.”

“Old hound dog Rinehart. Professor Pavlov’s bell rings and he salivates. Conditioned reflex. Karl was right.”

“Karl?”

“My editor. My father-image, I think.”

“Will you autograph these books for me? So I can impress my friends?”

“All right. But don’t be too disappointed if they aren’t impressed. I’m not very famous.”

“Just a little bit famous.” She got up and Miguel watched the rose swing across the room to a tiny black escritoire. She came back with a pen and handed it to him. He opened the books to the fly page and sat blankly, wondering what he could write there without being asinine or insulting. Finally he wrote, “For Jean with best wishes from Mike Rinehart,” on each and closed the books.

“You could have been less formal,” she said.

“To tell you the truth, I always feel like an ass when I have to autograph a copy of a book. I’m not witty and blank pages frighten me.”

She sipped at her cocktail and said, “I think you’re shy, Mike.”

“Maybe.”

“Shy, but nice.”

“Thanks,” he said dryly.

“I don’t say it as a joke.”

She moved closer to him. He could see her red toenails peeping out from under her like eyes bathed in pigeon’s blood. This is the way it goes, Miguel thought. Stylized as any pavanne.

Talk and talk and fence and fence, go through the figures of the dancing conflict and finally plunge into intimacy because there’s nothing more to say and you’re afraid of the dark.

For just an instant he had a vivid memory of Ella Eubanks and Martin Alberg panting on the sand. He put his fingertips on his eyes and pressed until the darting red fires devoured the image.

Then suddenly Jean was upon him and he upon her and he lost himself in desire, fumbling at her clothes like an animal, without thought.

Presently she sat up. Her blouse was open and her breasts exposed. She was breathing hard, as though she had been running a long distance.

“Let’s go. Now,” she said.

For a moment, Miguel with his mind dulled by excitement, did not understand her. She got up and changed the record and then walked into the bedroom. Miguel followed her like a man in a nightmare.

Hours later he got up and stumbled into the living room. He picked up the pitcher and a glass and went back into the dark bedroom and sat down on the edge of the rumpled bed. He poured a watery drink and gulped it thirstily. He was very drunk.

“Did you know hyenas eat their own entrails?” he asked.

She mumbled something behind him that he couldn’t understand and he poured more of the diluted stuff into his glass and drank. He felt as though he were going to burst into tears at any moment.

“What is it with you?” she asked.

He turned around and looked at her. She lay naked on the bed watching him. Maybe she was drunk too. It didn’t matter. He pressed his hand against his eyes again and the fiery streaks were like the orange memories of a snowfield dissolving into flame. Fire and snow.

He dropped his head into his hands and said, “In the night of fire and snow, save me from evil—”

She rose to one elbow to look at him. “What’s the matter?”

“That’s Auden,” he said. “Alaine loves Auden.”

“Auden?”

“Poetry, goddam it,” he yelled at her. He felt himself rocking from side to side. The room seemed to tip perilously. He recited in a loud voice, “Who is passionate enough when the punishment begins?”

He wheeled around and dropped the glass on the floor. The dregs of the martini wet his bare foot. He bore her back onto the pillows and buried his face in the hollow of her throat. He felt her arms go around him automatically. O my love, o my love, in the night of fire and snow, save me from evil. He could feel the tears hot and stinging behind his eyes. He heard himself talking, mumbling endlessly. “He just lay there in the snow and cursed my lousy guts and I wouldn’t let him die so I carried him and then they gave me a goddam medal. Me, for chrissake. A medal. I flushed it down the john in the BOQ and it plugged up the lousy plumbing.”

He pushed himself up on his elbows and looked down at her. In the dark, she was faceless. “At night all goddam cats are gray,” he said. “I need a drink.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed and fumbled for the glass and the martini pitcher. He poured a glass and offered it to her and she drank a little and handed it back. He finished it and then poured the last of the liquor out of the pitcher onto the floor.

He heard her laugh in the darkness.

“What’s so goddam funny?”

“I was just thinking of myself lying in bed with Nora Ames’s man,” she said. “Look whose time I’m beating.”

Miguel stared at her, trying to focus his eyes on the faint outline of her face. “God damn you,” he said. “God damn you to hell.”

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked.

“Shut up.”

“Now, wait a minute, mister. Who do you think you’re talking to? You can’t come in here and talk like that,” she said in an aggrieved voice.

He staggered to his feet. He had difficulty in standing, but he managed to stay erect bracing himself against the bed with his knee. He felt about as sick and degraded as he could ever remember being. She started to say something and he told her to shut up, for chrissake. He began looking for his clothes.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting out. Out,” he said.

“Like that?”

“Any goddam way. Getting out.” He could only think now of getting away, and through the spinning images in his brain he could see arching cables and a dark, swift fall toward utter peace.

He found his shoes and put them on. One sock he stuffed into his pocket as he pulled on his trousers and shirt. He wrapped his coat around him, shivering with a bone-cracking chill. He seemed to be moving through a thick sea of molasses.

Jean Murray was sitting up in bed watching him. He opened the door and in the shaft of light from the living room she looked as though she were carved of yellow stone. His stomach churned.

He made it into the living room. On the coffee table were the two books. He picked them up and then fumbled blindly in his pocket for some money. He found a bill and dropped it on the big black-and-gold couch and then he jammed the books into his coat pocket and plunged from the room and out into the street.

He stumbled and fell. His face lay on the cold pavement. He wanted to close his eyes and just stay there but he forced himself to his feet. He had forgotten where he had left the car. Far down the quiet street he could see the blue lights of an open bar. He began to walk in that direction. It seemed miles. Finally he reached the door and stood there for a moment, dragging gulps of cold night air into his lungs. A spasm hit him and he was sick, his eyes watering painfully and his stomach trying to shove itself into his throat.

Presently it was over and he found he could stand without the lights around him spinning. He stepped around the filthy mess he had made and walked into the bar. In the back he could see what he wanted. He walked to the phone booth and shut himself inside. The light seemed blinding. He could see the few customers staring impersonally at him through the windows. He opened the phone book and began to search. It took him a long time because the page kept dancing around but finally he found it. Fear was bursting like a rocket in his chest. He tore the page from the book and went out into the bar.

The bartender came around to meet him. “You okay, Mac?”

“All right,” Miguel said thickly. “Give me a brandy.”

“You’ve had more than enough.”

“Give me a goddam brandy and call me a cab,” Miguel shouted.

“Okay, Buster, but don’t get loud in here or I’ll lack your butt out.”

He went behind the bar and poured Miguel a pony of Christian Brothers. Miguel picked it up with shaking hands and drank. For a moment he didn’t think it was going to stay down. But it did and the lights started spinning again. He covered his eyes with one hand and steadied himself against the bar with the other. He could hear the bartender talking on the phone with the cab dispatcher.

“Your car will be right here. You wait for it outside.”

“I’ll be all right here.”

“Nothing doing. Out.”

Miguel nodded and put a dollar bill on the bar. He stumbled into a table and almost fell on his way to the door, but he made it with nothing more damaging than disgusted looks from some couples coming in.

Outside, he leaned against the side of the building trying to smother the pounding in his chest. He stank. He could smell himself. This is the end, he thought. Lower than this you can’t get. Not ever.

His thoughts were limping things, like three-legged stallions prancing around a hippodrome inside his skull. The ringmaster was a gigantic Raoul, wheezing dropsically and wielding a long whip.

A glare-eyed monster with chrome teeth and a yellow crest that said For Hire was looking for him. A cilium extruded itself and swung open a door. He plunged into the leathery, cigarette-smelling darkness. He gave the driver the address. The cab started. He wondered what the driver would do if he simply asked him to drive out to the bridge and leave him there. Probably he would eagerly alert the police. The world was filled with nosey, well-intentioned horse’s asses who would take you on as a responsibility at a dollar or so a mile. He could hear the cybernetic grumbling of the meter. He could see the drivers eyes watching him in the rear view mirror.

Nothing to worry about, bleeding heart, he thought. I’m harmless. I’m finally harmless. There’s no one left I can screw up. No one but myself. He thought about it and decided he didn’t even feel very sorry for himself any longer. There was nothing left inside at all. He felt like an empty shell with a great star-shot void inside. If I swallowed a pebble, he thought, it would fall a thousand miles before touching anything.

The cab stopped before a dark apartment house.

‘This is it,” the driver said. “You make it all right?”

Miguel fumbled in his pocket, found a bill and gave it to the driver.

Then the cab was gone and he was standing alone before the door, holding a match to read the names on the little cards by the buzzer panel. Swiftly, before he could make himself stop, he pressed the button. He leaned on it, tried to shove it through the wall.

The opening of the voicepipe said something he couldn’t understand. He drew back his fist and smashed it hard against the grille. Pain lanced through his hand. He pressed the buzzer again.

A voice said, “Who is it?”

“Open the door. It’s Mike Rinehart.”

“Who?”

Tears stung his eyes. His hand and arm throbbed. The street, dark and empty, spun around him. “It’s Mike—let me in, for chrissake!”

“Wait a minute. I’ll be right there,” the voicepipe said.

Miguel pressed his forehead against the wall and waited. It was like lying face up under the guillotine.

He heard someone behind the door. He tried to turn around to face the darkness but he couldn’t. He heard a woman’s voice and a man’s and then the door opened.

Miguel raised his head. The shadowy figure was huge and menacing on stiff legs. He took a step forward, hesitated, forced himself on. He felt hands on his shoulders. He said, “Jesus, Tom.” Absurdly, he began to cry. Then he passed out.

TWENTY-TWO

Miguel awoke and the sunlight was pouring through a window into a pleasant, unfamiliar room. He felt battered and sore. His right hand throbbed painfully. He looked at it and the knuckles were skinned badly.

His clothes were laid out on a chair, a dressing gown lay at the foot of the bed. He tried to reconstruct the night before. All he could be sure of was that he had gotten monumentally drunk and had tried to find Tom.

He could hear the sounds of someone moving lightly about in the apartment. He closed his eyes and tried to think.

He did not know how long he rested so before there was a light tap at the door.

“Come in,” he said hoarsely.

A rather pretty woman of about thirty opened the door. She was carrying a steaming cup of coffee.

“I thought you might need this,” she said.

Miguel nodded.

“I’m Katharine,” the woman said. “Tom had to run down to the shop. But he’ll be back in a half-hour or so.”

Miguel felt embarrassed and ill-at-ease. He was conscious of the way he must appear to her.

She put the coffee cup on the nightstand. “Are you feeling better now?”

“Yes, thanks. I’m sorry to be so much trouble.”

She smiled for the briefest instant and said, “You’re a friend of Tom’s. It’s no trouble.” She stopped for a moment and said, “Drink it while it’s hot.”

He sat up obediently and drank the scalding coffee. Katharine sat down on the edge of the bed and regarded him with a guarded expression.

Presently, she said, “There are some things I want to say to you before Tom gets back. But I don’t know how. We don’t know each other.”

There was a package of cigarettes on the nightstand and Miguel took one. He offered the pack to the woman but she shook her head. He lit his own and inhaled deeply, letting the smoke drive the cobwebs from his brain.

“You’re Tom’s wife,” he said.

“Yes. We’ve been married five years.”

“I see,” Miguel said slowly.

“Tom’s all right now,” the woman said. “I want him to stay all right.” Her dark eyes seemed to light up when she spoke about Tom, Miguel thought. And she wants him to stay all right. She’s frightened because I’ve come back.

“I understand,” he said.

“Do you?”

Miguel nodded, not looking at her. “I do.”

“I don’t want anything or anyone to harm him,” Katharine said.

“Yes,” Miguel said heavily. “Perhaps I’d better leave right away.”

“Tom doesn’t want you to,” she said. “I’m not sure about myself.” ‘

“I don’t mean Tom any harm,” Miguel said. “I—I was looking for something—”

“I love him, Mike,” she said, calling him by name for the first time.

Miguel could only nod his head.

“Now take a shower and come to breakfast.” She turned and walked out of the room.

When he was showered and shaved and dressed, he went out into the kitchen. His hand and arm hurt and Katharine said, “Let’s have a look at that. Who did you hit?”

Miguel said he couldn’t remember and let her wrap the hand with gauze.

“You’d better have that X-rayed,” she said briskly. “It might be broken.”

She served him scrambled eggs and bacon and he was surprised to find himself ravenously hungry. He ate and began to feel better.

After a second cup of coffee, he asked, “You said something about a shop. What shop is that?”

“Tom’s got his own auto-parts store.” She smiled suddenly and it seemed to transfigure her face. “Dual manifolds, special heads, racing pistons, things like that. He caters to the hot-rodders. It’s a good business.”

“Do you understand it?”

“Of course. Do you?”

“I would have once,” Miguel said thoughtfully, remembering Horace Greeley, the plans they had had so long ago for the red Chewy, the races on the back roads around Los Altos.

Katharine stood up. “There’s more coffee on the stove. I’ve got some shopping to do.”

“But Tom—” Miguel said, looking at his watch.

“He’ll be here.” She walked to the door and then turned back. “I forgot, Mike. There was a call for you yesterday. New York. Tom can give you the message.”

Miguel frowned. “A call? Here?”

Katharine shrugged. “A man, I think. Tom will know. I’ve got to run now.” And she vanished on her manufactured errand.

Miguel went to the stove and poured another cup of Katharine’s coffee and carried it into the living room.

The flat was pleasant, simply furnished. There were a few record albums in a cabinet near a table model radio-phonograph, a few books on a shelf near the window. He looked at the titles and saw his own books there.

Had Tom seen himself in The Exile, Miguel wondered. Had he understood what Miguel had been trying to say? He turned away from the bookcase and sat down, smoking nervously. He had an impulse to get his things and run but he sat without moving, knowing that he would never again have the kind of courage it had taken to come here.

He heard a key in the latch downstairs. The sound of the door opening and closing. And then a heavy, clumping step on the stairway.

Miguel’s hands were trembling as he crushed the cigarette out in an ash tray.

Tom came into the living room. His face was heavier, his body thicker. His hair had thinned a little. Miguel’s eyes went involuntarily to his legs.

Tom said quietly, “They fixed me up pretty good, Mike.”

Miguel sat where he was and shook his head. He couldn’t speak.

Tom walked slowly across the room and stopped in front of Miguel. He extended his hand. “It’s been too long, Spick. But I’m glad you came.”

Miguel took his hand. “I’m sorry I couldn’t come sooner, Tom,” he said.

The grip of Tom’s hand was still strong and warm.

“How’s Nora, Mike?”

“All right. Doing well.”

Tom walked to the window and looked out. Miguel winced at his stiff-legged gait. “Naturally, she would be.”

Miguel said nothing.

“I don’t mind any more,” Tom said. “You met Kate.”

“Yes.”

“She’s quite a girl. I met her while I was in the hospital. She was an Army nurse. We’ve been married five years.”

“She told me.”

Tom turned around and looked at Miguel with a half-smile. “You know what they say about the love of a good woman? Well, it’s true.”

Miguel nodded.

“Around here no one even knows I was ever married to Nora Ames. I like it that way.” He lit a cigarette and sat down beside Miguel, looking at the carpet with that same half-smile on his face. “I even take Kate to see Nora’s pictures. You might say we’re fans of hers.”

He paused and then said, “By the way. Karl Olinder called here yesterday. He warned me you might show up. He wants you to get in touch.”

“Karl knew I’d come here,” Miguel said thoughtfully.

“Spick,” Tom said. “I’m sorry about you and Alaine. I had a lot of time to think about it in the hospital. I could have saved it, I think. If I’d done the right thing.”

“No. No one could have done anything.”

“You’re wrong, Mike. Sorry, but you are. I should have kept Nora off your back. But I was hurt. I guess I didn’t want the same sort of life Ella and Oliver had.” He silenced Miguel’s protest with a gesture. “I know what you’re going to say. That Ella isn’t so bad. Spick, she even shacked up with Martin Alberg—that little zero. You knew all about that.”

“I didn’t think you did, Tom,” Miguel said.

“You were always the innocent one,” Tom said. “Right from that summer on the river when we were kids, I knew about it. I was so goddam ashamed I didn’t know what to do about it except be the big operator, the Mr. Know-it-all.”

Miguel thought of Tom in the vineyard, of Tom the sophisticate, Tom the worldly one. How little we knew of one another, he thought, when we needed to know so much.

“I had no idea you knew,” Miguel said. “I wish I had known.”

“What for? Could you have helped me? Remember that day on your father’s boat when Ollie went after that big blonde?

You knew then and you tried to help. But there’s nothing anyone can do.” He gave Miguel a twisted, mirthless smile. “Oh, I did a lot of thinking in the hospital, Spick. I thought about how I leaned on you. All along. I leaned on you so much that when the time came to stand on my own feet—” Miguel swallowed hard and tried not to look at the plastic machines Tom wore—“I couldn’t. I tried to kill us both and damn near did it.”

Tom massaged his thighs with his hands. “It wasn’t easy, any of it, Spick. I used to he in the hospital hating you and Nora. But pretty soon I had to start thinking for myself, too. Kate helped. I used to talk to her at night when I couldn’t sleep, when the pill-peddlers had me so full of hop I had to talk or go crazy. And I’d remember things that made it hard for me to keep on hating anyone. I’d think about what I wanted out of my marriage to Nora and I’d think what a damn fool I was to think I could have gotten it from her. You remember the first night—that party at my folks’ place when that son of a bitch from downstairs came up and took Ella into the bedroom? Nora never let me forget it. To give her her due, I guess that kind of respectability wasn’t what she wanted. You can’t blame her for that.”

He stood up and went again to the window, pulling the drape aside so that he could watch the street below. “And that night at Major Cavell’s place. If Nora had hung a sign up saying she was going to get you away from Alaine it wouldn’t have been any plainer. I could have stopped it. I could have gotten the hell out of the Flight Section and taken her with me. But I didn’t. And then that day on the airplane. Nora had told me the whole story that morning and I went rocky and tried to kill us both. God, if you only knew how many times since then I’ve broken out in a cold sweat thinking about that day. I was a phony, Spick. I didn’t want to die—not really. And if it hadn’t been for you, I’d have stayed up there on the mountain.”

He turned to face Miguel and said, “You know what Kate said to me last night after Olinder called? She said, ‘If he doesn’t come here I want you to find him.’ It’s important to her, you see?”

“She said that?”

Tom nodded. “I guess she knew that as long as you and I stayed apart I’d never really have Nora and the whole business off my mind.”

“Yes,” Miguel said thoughtfully. “I can see that.”

“I was the one who asked for the divorce,” Tom said. “Not Nora.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“There would be no reason for her to tell you, would there? The only thing is—if I’d had any idea of what it would do to you and Alaine I never would have let it happen. I swear it. When I read that book of yours—The Exile? You poor bastard, I wanted to bawl my eyes out for you, for me, for all of us. Maybe even for Nora, too. Because she isn’t ever going to have what she really wants. It doesn’t make sense, Spick, but there it is. In some crazy way both Nora and I thought we could get what we needed from you.”

“I’ve never had much to give anyone,” Miguel said.

“Let me finish. I got into the habit of turning to you a long while ago. Ollie and the old lady couldn’t give me what I had to have. You always did. Remember the money you got for me from Becky? I’ve often wondered what that cost you. More than two hundred bucks, I’ll bet my neck.” He drew a hand across his mouth and studied Miguel’s face somberly. “I had no business going into the Air Corps. You know it, and I do too.”

“Alberg told me something like that once.”

“That mealy-mouthed little snot,” Tom said. “But he was right. Oliver wanted it. He was a hotrock with a Sam Browne belt and a Sopwith Camel for six months and then he never did another damn thing all the rest of his life. That’s what he wanted for me. He meant well. It was all he knew. So I had to do it, too. I figured I could get through with you around. I did, too. Until you were shipped to Hamilton to fly for Kirbee and I was left in the fighter group. I got scared. You know what I did? I’ve never told this to a living soul. Not even Kate.”

“You don’t have to tell me anything, Tom.”

“Hell, I want to. Listen. I came down from Moses Lake on a weekend pass and I went to see your father. I begged him to get me transferred to the headquarters Flight Section.” Tom looked down into his cup and said, “I knew how things were with you and your dad. I told him you wanted it. I gave him the idea things would be better between you if he did this for me. And every time I’d hear you cursing his guts for not letting you go to war I would want to sink through the goddam floor. For a while I was able to convince myself I hated your insides—but it was really mine I couldn’t stand.” Tom pushed the cup away sadly and added, “So how do you forgive something like that? Your dad must have died thinking you wouldn’t even thank him for a favor to me. I knew he’d do anything for you and I took advantage of it. Does it do any good now to tell you how sorry I am?” Miguel said, touched, “You have nothing to be sorry for, Uncle.”

“You mean that?”

“I never meant anything more. The only thing either of us has to regret is all the wasted years.” Miguel was filled with a warmth, a sense of having discovered something he had always thought was lacking in his life. “You don’t owe me a thing, Uncle,” he said.

Tom looked around the apartment. “Except all this.”

Miguel sat back and relaxed, stretching his legs out.

“How about some coffee? I’ll get it.”

“Don’t move,” Tom said. “You had a rough night.”

Miguel looked at his watch. It was eleven o’clock. “This is Saturday, isn’t it?”

Tom nodded and poured the black coffee. “What are your plans now?”

“I had a car last night. I think I left it down on Bay Street.”

“I’ll drive you over. Then what?”

“I think I want to see Dorrie,” Miguel said slowly.

Tom nodded. They heard Katharine come in. She entered the kitchen looking flushed and pretty. “It’s chilly out,” she said. “Fall is really here.” She glanced at Tom and when she saw that he was smiling, she smiled too.

TWENTY-THREE

The Ford was parked on Bay Street. It had a traffic tag on the windshield. Miguel got out of Tom’s Buick and stood by the open driver’s window.

“Thanks for everything, Tom. I mean that.”

Tom’s big hand enfolded his. “I’m glad you came back, Spick. I can’t tell you how glad I am.” He paused and then asked, “What do you do now?”

“Back to the hotel first. I’ll get in touch with Olinder and see what’s on his mind.”

“He won’t be in today, will he?”

“I can get him at home.”

“Then what?”

“Nosey bastard, aren’t you,” Miguel said, smiling.

“Hollywood and Nora, Spick?”

“I don’t know, Tom. I really don’t know yet.”

“You don’t want any advice. I know that.”

“No, I don’t. For the first time in my life, I really don’t.”

“You’ll be all right?”

“I can’t promise that. But I’m going to try, Tom. I’m going to try like hell.”

“No more nights like last night, boy. You were on the deck.”

“Agreed, friend. You can’t stay on the bottom. Something has to give. I was ready for the deep six before I saw you and Kate. I’m better now.”

“Are you going to see Alaine?”

“Don’t look for the happy ending, Uncle. It isn’t always that simple. But the answer is yes, I am going to see her. For a little while, at least.” And then he added thoughtfully, “If I can.”

“Don’t be a stranger, Spick.”

“No, Tom. I won’t be.”

“No matter what. Even if it’s the dream factory and Nora.”

“That s a promise.”

“We’ll be looking for you,” Tom said, and put the car in gear. Miguel stepped back and said, “Cheers, boy.”

He watched him drive away. The sky overhead was bright and clear and a brisk wind blew in from the Marina. It smelled of salt water and the bay.

He got into his rented car and drove up Bay Street to Columbus and through the Saturday traffic up to Nob Hill.

He was thinking of Tom and Kate. Tom with his plastic legs and his speed shop and his Kate. He smiled a bit remembering the day Tom had taught him the rudiments of sex in the vineyard at the river. That all seemed a million years ago. And it was, too. Beyond the barrier of the war, before Alaine and Nora and even before Allie Wylie. He thought of all the things that went into the making of a man and wondered if any one thing could have been omitted in the development of the person he had become. He thought of Sandy Johnson and Midge—Midge married now to Lawt Higby and Sandy almost forgotten by those who had known him. When he thought of him at all it was because the night he died had been the beginning of something else for him. The Allie Wylie thing. The first outlines of a lovely, poignant and utterly false memory—

He left the car in the courtyard and went inside the lobby to pick up his key. The desk clerk handed him a telegram and said,

“There is a lady waiting for you, Mr. Rinehart. In the Peacock Lounge.”

Miguel thought: Alaine.

He walked swiftly across the lobby and into the lower bar. The place was nearly empty. The woman was there, all right, drinking a silver fizz and watching the entryway. It was Nora. He went over to her table and said, “Hello, Nora.”

“Surprised?” she asked. “Or disappointed?”

“I thought you’d be in Hollywood by this time.” He looked around. “Is Victor with you?”

“I came alone, Mike.”

“How did you know where to find me?”

She threw her head back and smiled at him. “I knew you’d come here.”

This was where it all started, Miguel thought. Right here on a night twelve years ago. So Nora was quite right in looking for him here. It couldn’t be any other way.

“Won’t you sit down?”

He lowered himself into a chair and said, “We’re being polite, Nora.”

“I have to be, don’t I? You’re still angry.”

He shook his head. “I’m not angry.”

“There’s a chill in here, then.”

“Nora,” he said. “Don’t.”

She looked at him with one eyebrow raised. “Don’t what?”

Her arch hostility sucked some of the life from him and he said, “All right, Nora, what is it?”

“Isn’t that a strange sort of thing to ask me? Where were you last night, Mike?”

“What are you doing now, Nora? Leaning a bit on the curb rein?” He tamped a cigarette on the table and lit it. She extended her hand and he gave it to her and lit another for himself. “Is there any reason I should tell you where I was or what I was doing?”

“You were with a woman, that’s obvious.”

“All right,” Miguel said in a tight voice. “I was with a woman. What else?”

“Were you?”

“What else?”

“Did you see Alaine?” she asked lightly.

“No.”

“I don’t believe you, Mike,” Nora said. “What did Beautiful Person have to say to you? Is she ready to welcome you back into her bed?”

Miguel began to feel the old suffocating sense of entrapment. Nora seemed to surround him so that no matter where he looked for escape, she was there with the right things to say to whip him back into line. It came as a shock, too, to realize that he was looking for escape from her. How long, he wondered, had he been thinking this way without realizing it? J. C. had sensed it, and so had Karl.

“Nora,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me Tom was married again?”

She began to laugh. “So that’s it.”

“That’s part of it.”

“Is it so important?”

“It’s important that you saw fit not to tell me,” he said.

Her bright gold-flecked eyes were narrowed. The flesh seemed stretched over the fine bones of her face. “So you’ve seen my dear ex-husband.”

“Yes,” he said. “You know what it does to us?”

“Us? You mean you and me, I take it. Why should it, as you put it, do anything to us?”

“If you really don’t know, I can’t tell you.” He flexed the fingers of his aching hand. Nora glanced at it.

“Is that from Tony?”

He shook his head and said, “I hit something a lot tougher than boola-boola Ayula.”

“You know, of course, that Tony is going to have a bridge? You broke one of his front teeth.”

“That’s a damn shame. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

“You certainly look sorry.”

Miguel was filled with a thick weariness. They were bogging down into trivia and bickering and he wanted to be done with it. He stood up and said, “I have to go upstairs, Nora.”

“Ill come with you.”

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

Her eyes glittered with angry disbelief. “You can’t do this, Mike. Not this way.”

He felt something tighten inside himself. “Watch me,” he said. He turned and walked out into the lobby.

Nora was right behind him when he reached the desk. The clerk said, “There’s a call for you, Miss Ames. Hollywood.”

Nora said to Miguel, “It’s Victor, Mike.” To the clerk, she said, “Have the call transferred to Mr. Rinehart’s room. I’ll take it there.”

“You’re really backing me into a corner, aren’t you?” Miguel said. “You’re going to make this tough.”

“I’m not going to let you make a fool of yourself, if that’s what you mean.”

They stepped into the elevator together and rode in silence to Miguel’s floor. She followed him down the corridor and he unlocked the door and stood aside to let her into the room.

She turned quickly as he shut the door and put her arms around him. “Mike,” she said huskily. “Let’s not fight, darling.” He took her arms from around his neck and shook his head. “Sorry, Nora. Not this time.”

“You’re still angry with me.”

“I’m not angry, Nora. Try to understand that.”

“Then why are you acting like this? I’m not one of your little tramps, Mike. I’m not just some floozy you picked up on the plane.” Her voice held a note of prideful steeliness. He looked at her smart suit and the expensive elegance of her jewels and he was remembering a night twelve years ago when a girl in a tight skirt and sweater had walked in and the piano player timed his music to her entrance. What was the song? “You Are Always in My Heart.” And now the magic was gone and Nora Ames was telling him she wasn’t just one of his tramps—

“We’re finished, Nora,” he said. “We were really finished when I stepped on that airplane to go to Paris, only we didn’t know it—”

“I still don’t know it,” Nora said. “I never will.”

“Nora,” he said quietly. “Once, a long time ago, you asked me to tell you when you were doing something wrong. I don’t know if you remember it, but I do. You wore an evening perfume to go to the beach and I said something about it and you made me promise I’d always let you know when something wasn’t right for you. I’m telling you now, Nora. This isn’t right for you. Don’t act like this.”

She turned away from him in a sudden fury. She walked to the window and then whirled around to face him. Miguel could almost see the stage directions printed on the script. Nora registers hurt anger—God, had it always been this false between them?

“You just walked out on the contracts in New York,” she said scathingly. “Are you doing the same thing to me now?”

“I didn’t mean to break up your party in New York,” Miguel said in a flat voice. “I just found I couldn’t take it.”

“Even if there were nothing else,” Nora said in a rush, “don’t you owe me something?”

“Maybe I do, Nora. But I think I’ve given it.”

She laughed harshly at him. “Do you? Stop and think about it, Mike. How long have I waited for you? How long?”

“Is that what you were doing?” he asked mildly. “Is that what you call waiting?”

“What are you trying to throw up to me now?”

“Nothing. For God’s sake, nothing. Let’s stop this.”

“So what do we do now?”

“You don’t need me, Nora. Let’s leave it at that.”

“So thanks, and tip your hat and that’s all. Is that it?”

He nodded sadly. “You can’t regret the wasted time any more than I do. We should have known better.”

She threw her head back angrily and said shrilly, “You really are beyond belief I”

“Nora, I’m trying to keep my temper.” His hand and arm throbbed and there was a headache beginning to pulse painfully behind his eyes.

“You’re trying. You!” She walked to the dresser and picked up the music box he’d bought for Dorrie at Orly. “I worked, Mike. I worked like crazy to get them to give you a job somewhere we could be together. I begged them to hire you.”

Miguel studied her pale face. He could feel himself growing more tense. “Was it so hard to convince them?”

She came toward him stiffly, still holding the music box. “Yes,” she said. “It was. You’re a has-been, Mike. They didn’t want to take a chance on you. And I made them do it—”

His lips felt stony and there was a dead lump in his chest. “Thanks,” he said. “I’m glad you told me.”

Her expression changed and she said contritely, “Oh, darling, I didn’t mean that. It isn’t true.”

He looked at her coldly. “It’s true, all right.”

“I said I’m sorry.” She moved toward him and he put out his bandaged hand to hold her off.

“Mike, please—” She sounded frightened.

“That was the clincher, Nora.”

“It isn’t true, Mike. I swear it. I don’t know why I said it.”

“If it were a lie, Nora, I’d know it. Just as I always knew inside me you were lying to people like Victor about Alaine—and to me about Tom. But you weren’t lying this time.” He turned away from her. “Why don’t you just go now?”

Nora stood rigidly. All the studied gracefulness and well-groomed good looks were gone. Her fingers imprisoned the music box like talons. “It’s Alaine, isn’t it, Mike?” she said gratingly. “After all this time it’s still that prissy little bitch.”

“I don’t expect you to understand,” he said slowly. “But Alaine has nothing to do with this.”

“You’ve seen her,” Nora accused. “You were with her last night.”

“No,” he said. “I haven’t seen her. Not yet.”

“Then you aren’t going to,” she said angrily.

Miguel studied her for a long moment. Then he said, “That was a wrong thing to say, Nora.” He opened the telephone book and began searching for Alaine’s number. He found it and picked up the phone.

“If you do this, Mike—” Nora said threateningly.

He nodded at her, listening to the ring. Alaine answered. He thanked God she was home. He said, “Allie? This is Mike. I m in San Francisco. Yd like to come out for a few minutes. Is it all right?”

Alaine didn’t sound surprised. He wondered if Tom or Becky had told her he was home. She said impersonally, “Why, all right, Mike. Dorrie will be very pleased.”

“In about forty-five minutes?” Miguel asked, looking at Nora.

“That will be fine.”

“See you then,” he said, and hung up.

Nora looked down at the pretty enameled box in her hands. “You planned it this way,” she said. “From the beginning.”

“I wish I could say yes to that. But I can’t.”

“This is for her, isn’t it?” Nora asked shakily, looking at the music box.

“It’s for Dorrie,” Miguel said, holding out his hand. “Give it to me, Nora.”

She threw it against the wall with all her strength. It shattered with a twanging note that hung mournfully in the air.

For some reason the willful destruction of the pretty little music box moved him to more real anger than he had felt since finding Nora in the hotel. He felt the blood drain away from his face and he stood up. “That does it, Nora,” he said.

He watched her turn and walk out of the room, her back rigid. As the door slammed, the telephone rang. It was a moment before he could pick it up.

“Hollywood calling Miss Nora Ames,” the operator said.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “Miss Ames isn’t here now.”

“What time do you expect her?”

“I don’t,” he said, and put the receiver down carefully.

TWENTY-FOUR

He sat for a time looking at the pieces of the music box on the floor, the tiny shards of enamel, the dented cylinder, the uncoiled spring. So this was the way it ended, after twelve years. In a while, when her anger dissipated itself, Nora would regret it. But regretting something wasn’t the same thing as repairing it. He thought now, as he had in the arcade at Orly, that it was indeed a mistake to go back. The past was dead and should stay that way. You couldn’t breathe new life into the corpse of an old emotion, you couldn’t rekindle old loves.

He lit a cigarette and studied his bandaged hand. If thy right hand offend thee—smash it against a wall. If your life disgusts you, drop it off a bridge… .

He shook himself and stood up. He walked to the dresser. The sealed telegram lay there. He had forgotten it. Clumsily, because his hand was stiff, he opened it.

It was from Karl. It said: BOOK SALVAGEABLE IF YOU WANT TO WORK HOW ABOUT IT PENITENT?

He jammed the wire into his coat pocket and began to laugh helplessly. Saved by the goddam bell. Now all he needed to know was the simple answer—the answer that had escaped him for thirty-three years. He looked at his tired reflection in the mirror. Do you want to work? he asked himself. You haggard bastard, do you? His image looked back at him, sullen as Sinanthropus, and, he thought, about as intelligent.

He walked out of the room and down the hall to the elevator. He was thinking now about Jean Murray. He’d behaved like a son of a bitch last night. Right on course, as always. The excuses floated feebly to the surface of his mind but he found he could not really accept them and they sank again into the turgid flow of thought. She was promiscuous? What was he? She used him to gratify some defiant need of her own? He still remembered with distaste that crack about beating Nora Ames’s time. But what right had he to criticize her for that? He used her more brutally than she did him. It wasn’t her fault he could find no real satisfaction in it.

Outside, in the courtyard, he paused to look at the sky. The wind had died down a bit and the sun was warm. The sounds of the city impinged on his consciousness, but vaguely, in a dreamlike montage.

The great affair was over. He should be feeling the loss. Instead there was nothing, not even any real regret. Instead he thought of his family. There was cause enough for regret in all that without adding the long affair with Nora. But he felt nothing.

As he drove toward Seacliff, he wondered what he would say to Alaine. He could think of nothing. It seemed to him that a knife-blade had fallen across his life in the last few hours, severing the long-suffering raw nerves that bound him to his past. It was a kind of rebirth, for better or worse.

He was naked as a newborn child now. No job, no money to speak of, no love. He was a blank matrix now, without anticipation, without feeling.

He remembered the old urgencies that had once dominated his life and they seemed hollow. The fear of death that had driven him to take Aldyth, the terror of loneliness that had made him want Nora, the assault on the senses and the desire to compete with his father that made him want Becky, and the desire for stability and a second chance that had caused him to marry Alaine—gone, now. There was nothing left. And there was a kind of lethal peace in this emptiness he was feeling now. He honestly didn’t know if he wanted to disturb it. For a moment, he considered turning back and not seeing Alaine and Dorrie at all but then he realized that the reaction was a hangover from before—from the hit-and-run time. That was all over and done with, too.

He drove down Fulton Street toward the ocean, along the northern edge of Golden Gate Park. Children were running along the sidewalks, shouting in the sunlight. He drove slowly, not fighting the traffic as he usually did. At Twenty-ninth Avenue he turned north and drove through the district of white-faced flats and houses toward the curve of Seacliff Drive. He found Alaine’s number without any trouble. It was a low white house.

Dorrie met him at the door. For a moment he didn’t recognize her. She had grown so in the last year and her hair was cut short. It was dark, dark as his own—not blond like Alaine’s.

She greeted him with the kind of grave courtesy one reserves for privileged strangers and a hand seemed to tighten around his heart.

He picked her up and said tentatively, “Hello, daughter.”

She put her arms around his neck and said, “I’m glad you’re home, Daddy.”

Miguel carried her into the living room. Alaine was standing there waiting for him. She was wearing a yellow skirt and cardigan with a gay scarf knotted at her throat and she looked like a girl. Miguel said, “You’re looking well, Allie.”

“It’s good to see you, Mike,” she replied. Her voice was friendly, impersonal. This isn’t going to be easy, Miguel thought.

He put Dorrie down and said, “She’s getting to be a young lady, Allie.”

“I’m ten,” Dorrie said proudly. “Today.”

Miguel felt suddenly lumpish and stupid. How could he have forgotten Dome’s birthday! September 6. He thought of the shattered music box and inwardly he cursed Nora.

He looked appealingly at Alaine. “I’m up to my usual standard of ineptness, Allie.”

“Do you want to see the table for my party?” Dorrie asked. “All right,” Miguel said.

Dorrie took his hand and led him into a dining alcove. Miguel could hear someone in the kitchen preparing food.

“That’s Suzie,” Dorrie said, “she’s making a cake for me but I’m not supposed to know.” When she laughed, Miguel thought, her eyes were just like Allie’s.

Dorrie led him around a table set with favors. “I’m having five guests,” she said. “And look up there.”

A piñata hung from the ceiling, decorated with brilliant paper streamers. Miguel was lost in a sudden flood of memories. Concha had always had a piñata for his birthdays. The olla filled with candies and toys to be broken by blindfolded children with a stick. Miguel watched Dorrie moving around, arranging the place tags on the table, and there was a tightness in his throat. Maria’s heritage and his was Dorrie’s too. She looked up at him and said in childishly accented Spanish, “Está todo bien, papacito?”

Miguel looked over at Alaine standing in the doorway watching them. “That, too, Allie?”

“She wanted to learn Spanish,” Alaine said. “She’s done well, don’t you think?”

Miguel nodded, watching his daughter and too full of emotion to speak. He thought of the years he had spent regretting his heritage and now it was Alaine who had seen to it that his daughter was not deprived of what was truly hers. It was a kind, big thing that not one woman in thousands could have done—to keep the personal bitterness apart and offer his child such a gift.

Dorrie said, “You’ll be staying for the party, Daddy?”

“I don’t think so, Dorrie,” he said, still shaken.

“Won’t you stay, Mike?” Alaine asked. “You’re welcome.”

He shook his head and walked into the living room again. Alaine followed him. He studied her angular good looks and thought that the years had changed her very little.

“She’s a fine girl, Allie,” he said. “You’ve done very well with her. I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you. For everything.”

“Thank you, Mike.” Alaine said.

He sat down and Alaine asked him if he’d like a drink. He said no, thanks. She asked him about the new book.

He handed her Olinder’s telegram. “I saw Karl in New York,” he said.

She looked up from the wire. “Are you going to rewrite it?” she asked.

“I don’t know yet.” She was wondering about the Hollywood thing, he knew, but he didn’t want to talk about that quite yet. Instead he said, “I saw Tom last night, Allie.”

Her eyes were cool and gray as he remembered them. “Yes,” she said. “I know. He called me.”

“The old uncle is doing great,” he said.

“I’m glad you went to see him, Mike.”

“I was full of Dutch courage.”

“It doesn’t matter, does it?”

“No,” he said. “I guess not. I’m glad I saw him, too.” He took a cigarette from the ceramic box on the table and lit it. “I saw Becky, too.”

Alaine nodded slowly. “She told you about Luis.”

“Yes,” Miguel twisted the cigarette between his fingers. “I’m sorry you didn’t know him, Allie. He was quite a guy.”

A silence fell between them and Miguel felt lost and hopeless. You didn’t just walk out of the life of a woman like Allie and then back in without a by-your-leave. And was it what he wanted? He studied the soft curve of her cheek, the smooth heavy texture of her hair. He knew what he wanted. He wanted to come home.

“I was in Rapallo,” he said. “I thought of you.”

“Is it still the same?”

“Just the same. Beautiful.”

She sat quite still, watching him. It seemed to him that there was in her expression the same guarded wariness he had seen in Katharine’s. The look of a woman seeing a danger.

“It’s hard to go backwards, Allie,” he said.

“You can’t,” she replied. “Don’t you know that yet?”

“I’m finding it out. There’s no chance, then?”

“Not to go back, Mike. You can’t recapture things that have passed you by.” She fell silent and then, after a moment, she asked, “What are your plans? Are you going to stay in this country for a while?”

“I really don’t know yet, Allie,” he said slowly. “I think I’m going to the mountains for a day or so. There’s something I have to do. Something I should have done a long time ago. Then I’ll see.”

“The Spur, Mike?”

“Yes.”

“I’m glad.”

“I think I am, too. Maybe it will make up for a few things.” Dorrie came in and said, “Daddy, can’t you stay for the party, please?”

“No, baby,” he said. “I really can’t. But I have something for you.”

“A present? From Europe?”

Miguel said, “I had something else for you. It got—broken. But this is from Europe, too.” He unfastened his collar and took off his mother’s medallion. Alaine was watching him. Did her eyes seem brighter and did he imagine he saw something like tears? It didn’t matter. He held the medallion so that Dorrie could see the miniature of the Holy Virgin. “This belonged to your grandmother,” he said. “It’s yours now.” He fastened the chain around her neck and kissed her.

“I have to show Suzie!” Dorrie cried excitedly.

He watched her go, thinking: I never should have left her. I’ve missed so many of the good years.

Alaine said, “And when you come back from The Spur, Mike? What then? Hollywood?”

“No, Allie. I won’t go south under any conditions, but what I do depends on you, I think.”

She stood up and walked to the window, her back to him. “Are you trying to ask for something, Mike?”

“I was never very good at it, was I? Yes, I’m asking for something.” He stood behind her and touched her shoulder gently.

“People get lost, Allie,” he said quietly. “People get lost and you can’t blame them for it. You can only pity them and help them find their way. You can’t lead them and you can’t drive them. All you can do is help. I need your help. I think you know that. I want to come home, Allie.” He turned her around and saw that her eyes were closed and there were tears on her cheeks.

“Why, Mike?” she asked. “Because you pity me?”

“Because I love you,” he said. “Because I don’t know how to love anyone else.”

He lifted her face and for a moment she tried to turn it from him. He remembered the warmth of her body against his, the soft tender cries of her lovemaking, the loneliness of those days when he cut himself off from her and made her walk through his life as a stranger.

“Are you sure?” she asked. “I don’t want to be hurt again.”

He released her and said, “Wait for me, Allie. And I’ll prove it to you.”

“All right, Mike,” she said faintly. “I’ll be here.”

Dorrie burst through the door and saw him taking up his trenchcoat. “Are you going so soon?” she protested.

“I’m sorry,” Miguel said.

“I never get to see you. When will you be back?”

He looked at Alaine and said, “Soon, Dorrie. Very soon.” Alaine walked to the car with him. The warm autumn sunlight was bright on the white face of the city and there was a tang of salt in the air. He stood, not touching her, and said to Alaine, “A day. Maybe two.”

“All right, Mike,” she said. And as she walked back to the house she turned and he could see that she was smiling.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alfred Coppel was born thirty-five years ago in Oakland, California. He attended Menlo College and Stanford University, served four years in the Air Force during the Second World War, and has written one other novel, Hero Driver, published in 1953. Mr. Coppel is now living in Switzerland with his wife and two children.

CONTENTS

BOOK ONE Paris - San Francisco

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

BOOK TWO San Francisco

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

About the Author

Table of Contents

- NightHawk Books
- BOOK ONE Paris - San Francisco
- Chapter One
- Chapter Two
- Chapter Three
- Chapter Four
- Chapter Five
- Chapter Six
- Chapter Seven
- Chapter Eight
- Chapter Nine
- Chapter Ten
- Chapter Eleven
- Chapter Twelve
- Chapter Thirteen
- Chapter Fourteen
- Chapter Fifteen
- Chapter Sixteen
- Chapter Seventeen
- BOOK TWO San Francisco
- Chapter Eighteen
- Chapter Nineteen
- Chapter Twenty
- Chapter Twenty-One
- Chapter Twenty-Two
- Chapter Twenty-Three
- Chapter Twenty-Four
- About the Author